Iitaasi iyali ya kuthwa mombepo moSenegal omolwomahololodhilaadhilo
… as Sarkozy cries ‘scandal’
EPANGELO lyaSenegal olya kutha mombepo pakathimbo omakuthiikuthi giitaasi iyali yoradioyomuzizimbeoshokaanuwaohayi ungaunga unene nomahololodhilaadhilo ngoka ga hwahwamekwa kekwatepo lyomuleli gwongundu yompilamena, Ousmane Sonko.
Iitaasi iyali mbyoka ya gumwa ketokolo lyongundu yokukondolola omakwatathano gomakuthiikuthi yedhina National Audiovisual Regulatory Council (CNRA) oyo Sen TV noWalf TV.
Iitaasi mbika otayi ulikwa omunwe anuwa sho ya kala nokutula ko omafano gekuyunguto konima yemangepo lyaSonko, oshikundaneki sho-AFP tashi ti ngaaka. Kuyele, opolisi oya li yi ipumu mumwe naayambidhidhi yaSonko mondoolopa yaBignona muumbugantu waCasamance mEtine.
Epangelo olya li lya koleke kutya
omuntu gumwe okwa li a dhipagwa miikolokosha mEtine, konima sho Sonko a li a kwatwa po moDakar mEtitatu.
Sonko otaku fekelwa anuwa a kwata omukiintu koonkondo posalona hoka anuwa a li a ka thulwa, ashike okwa ikala omapopyo ngaka.
Okwa ti shika omatamaneko gopapolitika nota ti epangelo lyaPresidente Macky Sall olya hala okukwashilipaleka kutya ita ka kutha ombinga momahogololo taga landula. Aaleli yamwepo yoongundu dhompilamena oya li ya indikwa yaa kuthe ombinga momahogololo go2019 omolwomatompelo gopaveta, naSonko ota ti ndjika oyo ondjila ya landulwa kwaambaka.
Oshiwike sha za ko, opaliamende yaSenegal oya li ya hogolola opo Sonko a ka taalele oshipotha she shekwato koonkondo.
TUNIS - When Nadia told police about her husband’s violence during a coronavirus lockdown in Tunisia, she nearly lost custody of her daughter, illustrating a chasm between a gender law and its enforcement.
Adopted in 2017, the celebrated law greatly expanded the scope of punishable violence against women and in theory provides wide-ranging support to victims, making the country a pathfinder among regional peers.
But getting justice remains a battle without any guarantee of success, due to waning political will and scant funding.
For several years, Nadia, in her forties, weathered threats and mistreatment at the hands of her husband.
With no income of her own, she did not feel she could complain.
“He would do it when drunk, then apologise,” Nadia said.
“He left for several months every year to work abroad, so I preferred to do nothing” about the abuse, she added.
But things became intolerable during a three-month lockdown to forestall the spread of the coronavirus a year ago.
“He was stuck in the house, stressed. He drank a lot,” Nadia said.
“One day my daughter told me of inappropriate advances” of a sexual nature.
Nadia immediately called the police, who summoned her a few days later.
She was one among many Tunisian women who suffered a surge in violence during the March to June lockdown, as reported cases spiked five-fold, according to authorities.
And cases remain high. But Nadia says she was completely blindsided by what happened next.
While her initial interaction with the police was positive, things quickly turned sour.
Her husband was able to afford a lawyer, while she is destitute and fears he may have bribed the police or magistrates.
The police requested she put together an evidence file herself.
After several weeks without any progress and by now desperate and terrified of losing custody of her daughter, Nadia turned to a women’s group for help.
The Association of Women Democrats (ATFD), which provides everything from shelter to legal help, linked her up with a lawyer who found that the police station had not even sent her evidence to court.
The file was then sent to a second magistrate and a few days later her husband was finally arrested.
“Fortunately I found some support,” Nadia said.
But by that stage, “I had nearly lost everything, even my daughter.”
The 2017 legislation, known as Law 58, was drafted in consultation with women’s activists and associations.
In theory, it covers prevention, suppression and protection against violence, along with compensation.
To improve the care of women seeking police protection, the interior ministry has established 130 specialist brigades since 2018.
Specific education on such violence is now provided in police schools, while officers who attempt to discourage women from lodging cases face prison terms.
Several hundred police officers, including many women, have received specialist training in order to lead investigations or enforce restraining orders.
But activists say they still face an uphill slog.
“There is an enormous gap between the law of 2017, which is still very recent, and institutional and social practices,” said Yosra Frawes, who heads the ATFD.
Her organisation reports that many more women are seeking support than this time last year.
Enforcement of the law “requires infrastructure, counselling centres, refuges - but the state has no budget” for such things, Frawes noted.
“The issue of women has disappeared from the public debate” since elections in 2019, when avowedly conservative candidates performed well, she lamented.
A 2018 bid to overhaul Tunisia’s inheritance law - currently based on Islamic law, meaning that women inherit only half of their male siblings’ share - has subsequently foundered.
“We must fight two parallel battles - those of laws, and those of attitudes”, said Frawes, noting that much work still needs to be done in training the police, judges, lawyers and doctors in appropriate responses.
PARIS - The French justice system has scored a series of major victories in highprofile corruption cases against right-wing politicians, but the successes have sparked claims of bias and verbal attacks on prosecutors and judges.
After the stunning conviction of ex-president Nicolas Sarkozy this week, a debate has raged about whether the sword of justice is getting stronger, or whether its blows are being manipulated.
Sarkozy, who became the first modern president sentenced to jail, has consistently sought to portray the multiple investigations into his affairs since leaving office in 2012 as a witch hunt.
He has called it a “scandal that will remain in the annals of history,” has questioned whether France still lives under the rule of law, and suggested that the tactics of investigators are reminiscent of those in “Mr Putin’s Russia.”
When asked for his reaction in a prime-time television interview on Wednesday, the 66-year-old said he was “used to suffering this harassment.”
Sarkozy’s influence-peddling conviction follows the sentencing last June of his ally and long-time prime minister Francois Fillon, who was found guilty of giving fake parliamentary jobs to his wife.
Fillon, whose presidential campaign was derailed by the allegations in 2017, once accused magistrates of conspiring in a “political assassination”.
On Thursday, it was the turn of former defence minister Francois Leotard, who said he was “ashamed of the French justice system” after he was found guilty of organising kickbacks in defence deals in the 1990s.
The attacks, particularly by Sarkozy and his allies, led Justice Minister Eric Dupond-Moretti this week to worry about the “shouting” and what he called the “mistrust” of the justice system.
And Sarkozy’s successor as president, Francois Hollande, said Saturday that he “cannot accept these repeated attacks on the judiciary and its independence”.
Already in France, less than one in two people (48%) express confidence in the justice system, according to an annual survey by the Cevipof political institute at Sciences Po university in Paris.
Much of the “shouting” has been directed at the National Financial Prosecutors’ office (PNF), a specialist anti-corruption agency set up in 2014 to prosecute fraud and white-collar criminals.
In the seven years since, it has become one of France’s most fearsome prosecution services after pursuing Sarkozy, Fillon and Sarkozy’s top confidant Claude Gueant.
They have all been convicted, but will appeal.
Others brought to book by the PNF include the right-wing mayor of a wealthy suburb of Paris, Patrick Balkany, who was found to have used offshore accounts and hidden luxury villas from tax authorities. Some of the criticism relates to the PNF’s choice of targets the most prominent recent cases involve right-wingers - while others have questioned its methods, which include extensive wiretapping.
“Politicised justice is something from other countries, other geographic spheres,” the PNF director Jean-Francois Bohnert said this week when asked about the accusations of bias.
“The PNF does not do politics, the PNF does not deal in political crimes: the PNF deals with economic and financial crimes,” he said.
Defenders of the office point out that it was set up by a Socialist government to prosecute one of its own: former budget minister Jerome Cahuzac, who was found to be hiding cash in a Swiss bank account.
The PNF’s work goes far beyond pursuing prominent politicians, who form a small minority of the 605 cases currently overseen by its team of 17 specialised magistrates.
Many cases involve foreigners, including the playboy son of the long-time leader of oil-rich Equatorial Guinea; former global athletics chief Lamine Diack; and figures involved in the awarding of football World Cups to Qatar and Russia.
In 2017, the PNF negotiated a 300-million-euro (US$360 million) payout from the Swiss arm of British bank HSBC, and it secured a 3.7-billion-euro fine from Swiss bank UBS in 2019, for encouraging clients to commit fraud.
Since its creation, the office “has brought back to state coffers the rather large sum of 10 billion euros through its confiscations and fines,” Bohnert told RTL radio on Tuesday.
Tom Burgis, author of the recent book “Kleptopia: How Dirty Money Is Conquering the World”, says “the standard first move” from the corrupt is to try to undermine their investigators.
He told AFP that financial and political backing for institutions like the PNF was essential in developed democracies.
“They are on the frontline, but they are generally spectacularly underfunded,” he said.
Prosecutions of French politicians - and allegations of bias - pre-date the creation of the PNF.
Late right-wing president Jacques Chirac and former prime ministers Alain Juppe and Edith Cresson were all convicted.