African Union issues Hague trial warning

ADDIS ABABA, Ethiopia — The African Union will not allow a sitting head of state to be prosecuted by an international tribunal, the body’s chairman said Saturday, in a clear warning that it hopes to stop the crimes-against-humanity trial about to begin in The Hague, Netherlands, against Kenya’s President Uhuru Kenyatta.

African countries accuse the International Criminal Court of disproportionately targeting African leaders. The court has indicted only Africans so far, though half of the eight cases it is prosecuting were referred by African governments.

It was not immediately clear how much power the African Union has to stop the proceedings against Kenyatta, who is accused of complicity in ethnic unrest after Kenya’s disputed 2007 election, in which more than 1,000 people were killed.

The decision at the close of a one-day heads-of-state summit was unanimous, said Ethiopian Prime Minister Hailemariam Desalegn. Kenyatta and Sudan President Omar al-Bashir — also wanted by the war-crimes tribunal — were in attendance.

Kenyatta, 51, has been in office since April. He is from the Kikuyu ethnic group and is accused of having financed and helped organize the Mungiki, a militialike organization that was implicated in the worst atrocities against other ethnicities in the wake of the 2007 vote.

AP/DAR YASIN A Kashmiri woman helps her daughter kiss the religious iron chain Saturday at the entrance to the shrine of Shah-e-Hamdan in Srinagar, India, on the anniversary of the death of 14th century scholar Mir Syed Ali Hamadani.