French police protect Mugabe and arrest human rights protesters.
Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe escaped arrest in Paris, after the French judicial authorities ruled that, as a serving Head of State, he has immunity from prosecution.
Simultaneously, human rights campaigners protesting against Mugabe’s bloody regime were hunted by riot police through the streets of Paris, following the French government’s decision to ban demonstrations and order the arrest of protesters.
Mugabe was in Paris to meet President Chirac and attend the Franco-African summit at the Palais des Congres – from 19 to 21 February 2003.
Despite the heavy clamp down, a rolling programme of day-long, hit-and-run anti-Mugabe protests began mid-morning, on 19 February, outside the Ministry of Justice. Gay human rights campaigner Peter Tatchell and Zimbabwean exiles and refugees, supported by Parisian gay activists from the group Pantheres Roses, blockaded the main doors. Unfurling a huge banner, “Mugabe on trial for torture, rape and murder!” They called on the French government to enforce its laws against torture by prosecuting President Mugabe.
“The riot police, the CRS, shoved us away from the Justice Ministry and threatened us with arrest. No arrests were made. The massive media presence made the police wary. At that stage, they apparently decided that mass arrests would be bad for their image”, said Tatchell.
At midday, the protesters descended on the Palais de Justice, to support Peter Tatchell’s legal application for Mugabe’s arrest on charges of torture. The application was presented to the Deputy Prosecutor of Paris, Christian Ligneul.
“Under French law, anyone who commits, authorisies or consents to acts of torture anywhere in the world can be arrested and tried in France”, said Tatchell.
“The 100-page arrest warrant application documented evidence of Mugabe’s collusion with torture, including affidavits from Zimbabwean torture victims and reports from Amnesty International and Physicians for Human Rights (Denmark), which confirmed the widespread, routine use of torture in Zimbabwe”.
“I was granted a 30-minute meeting with the Deputy Prosecutor, and was accompanied by the main plaintiff in the case, torture victim Tom Spicer. Mr Ligneul acknowledged that I had presented a serious, substantive case for Mugabe’s arrest”.
“But he said the official French view was that President Mugabe enjoyed immunity as Head of State. I presented five counter-arguments as to why immunity does not apply in this case, and was informed they would receive careful consideration”.
“I told the Deputy Prosecutor: ‘If Slobodan Milosevic can be indicted while he was Head of State of Yugoslavia, why can’t Robert Mugabe?'”
See below for more details about the legal case for President Mugabe’s arrest.
Mugabe protected, human rights protesters arrested
“At 3pm, the Paris gay rights group, Act Up, staged a lively, short-lived protest outside the Zimbabwean Embassy. When one member threw fake blood at the building, the police arrested nearly everyone – even television cameramen and protesters who were not involved in the paint throwing”.
“Just over an hour later, outside Mugabe’s hotel, the Plaza Athenee, Zimbabwean exiles and refugees unfurled banners calling for his prosecution on torture and murder charges. They were immediately arrested, driven away in a police bus and taken to a nearby police station where they were locked in the cells. I only escaped arrest because I had been delegated to phone up journalists. Soon after the others had been seized, the police came for me. But I got away”, said Tatchell.
“The entire apparatus of the French state seemed to be organised to protect Mugabe and suppress any protest against his murderous regime”.
The next day, 20 February, Peter Tatchell, Tom Spicer and Alan Wilkinson of the Zimbabwee Association in London, planned to ambush President Mugabe’s motorcade as he arrived at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs for lunch with the French Foreign Minister.
“As we left Invalides metro station, Alan and I were seized in a dragnet operation by riot police and undercover secret service agents. They didn’t recognise Tom until he had walked quite a distance. Officers gave chase but he outran them”.
“We were searched, had our hidden placards confiscated, and were then bundled into a police van and taken into ‘preventive detention’ at a nearby police station”.
“I was told by the senior arresting officer that the Interior Minister had ordered the arrest of all protesters. ‘No demonstrations are permitted’, he told me. ‘It has been ordered by the Interior Minister'”.
“We were held by the police for nearly two hours, until Mugabe left the Foreign Ministry. On our release, we were trailed by police cars and plainclothes officers. We were hunted like rats through the streets of Paris. The last time I experienced such repressive policing was when I staged a gay rights protest in communist East Berlin in 1973”.
Reflecting on the legal bid and protests, Peter Tatchell said:
“We turned Mugabe’s visit to Paris into a PR disaster for him and the French government. Before our protests, Mugabe’s tyranny was not an issue in France. After our actions, it became a big story”.
“We succeeded in highlighting Mugabe’s human rights abuses, but failed to get him arrested. I will keep trying. One day, he will end up on trial, just like Slobodan Milosevic”.
“Instead of indulging this dictator with weak, ineffectual sanctions, it is time all European Union governments issued arrest warrants and extradition orders. The one sanction Mugabe really fears is prosecution. He is terrified of suffering the same fate as Milosevic”, said Tatchell.
The legal basis for President Mugabe’s arrest under French law
“France has incorporated the UN Convention Against Torture into its domestic law. It provides for the arrest of anyone who commits, authorises or condones the use of torture anywhere in the world. I am seeking Mugabe’s arrest on the grounds of torture, rather than murder or genocide, because it is the strongest legal basis for securing a conviction. Most other human rights laws are weaker and more difficult to enforce”, said Tatchell.
“I filed an affidavit from Ray Choto, the Zimbabwean journalist who was tortured, according to his interrogators, on Mugabe’s personal orders in 1999. News reports from the BBC and Guardian confirm that when Mugabe was asked about Choto’s torture he replied that the torturers were justified and Choto had got what he deserved. This is tantamount to colluding with torture, which is a crime under French law”.
“I also presented an affidavit from Tom Spicer, attesting to his torture, in 2002, by police who were allegedly acting under ‘Presidential powers'”.
“Additional affidavits and reports from human rights groups – such as Amnesty International, Zimbabwe’s Amani Trust and the Danish Physicans for Human Rights -state that the use of torture in Zimbabwe is endemic, routine and systemic; that it is widely publicised and well known; that President Mugabe must be aware of its use; and that he has taken no discernible action to condemn it or stop it, or to bring the perpetrators to justice”.
See TORTURE AFFIDAVITS below for more details.
“In terms of the UN Convention, and its incorporation into French law, this amounts to a violation of Article 1 of the UN Convention which criminalises not only the practice, commission or instigation of torture but also “consent or acquiescence” by state officials”.
“It is my view that President Mugabe does not enjoy Head of State immunity under the French law against torture, and that there are legal precedents for his prosecution:
1) Article 4 1. of the UN Convention Against Torture states that it applies to “any
person” and gives no exemptions to Heads of State.
2) Article 227 of the Treaty of Versailles set the legal precedent in that Heads of State are not immune from prosecution under international law.
3) The Nuremberg Tribunal judgement of 30 September 1946 reiterated this precedent when it ruled that the Nazi leaders did not enjoy immunity for crimes against humanity.
4) These earlier precedents were reconfirmed by the ICTY indictment of Slobodan Milosevic in 1999, while he was still the serving Head of State of Yugoslavia.
Article 27 of the UN Rome Statute 1998, which created the International Criminal Court, and has been ratified by France, explicitly states there is no immunity for Heads of State with respect to crimes against humanity, such as torture.
“My endeavours are, I hope, the beginning of a global campaign to enforce international human rights laws and to put on trial all tyrants and torturers. Mugabe is merely the first of many. Next in line are King Fahd of Saudi Arabia, the Burmese junta, Saddam Hussein, the dictatorship in Belarus and many more. I want to see an international citizen’s movement for the arrest and prosecution of all human rights abusers.
“Human rights will only become a universal principle of national and international law when ordinary people demand it and refuse to accept anything less”, said Tatchell.
TORTURE AFFIDAVITS – more detail
Mr Tatchell has affidavits from two well-documented torture victims, the Harare journalists Ray Choto and the late Mark Chavunduka. According to Amnesty International: “Military interrogators beat both men all over their bodies with fists, wooden planks and rubber sticks, particularly on the soles of their feet, and gave them electric shocks all over the body, including the genitals”.
Choto’s affidavit, which was filed with the Deputy Prosecutor of Paris, says his interrogators told him that “the President had signed my death warrant and that my torturers were to ‘go ahead'”.
Mugabe later refused to condemn the men’s torture: “I will not condemn my army for having done that.they can do worse things than that”, Mugabe told Voice of America Radio. In response to four Supreme Court judges who wrote to him expressing disquiet about the case, the President denounced their “impudence” and called on them to resign.
Another prominent torture victim is Tom Spicer, aged 18, who was tortured last year at Harare Central police station by Mugabe’s secret police, the CIO. In his affidavit for the Tatchell legal case Spicer recalls: “I was punched, kicked in the stomach, beaten with objects. subjected to repeated electrical shocks. my body convulsed so violently that the handcuffs on my wrists tightened causing my wrists to swell out of all proportion to their normal size.I was also told categorically that those present had Presidential powers and that whatever methods they used or whatever they did to me would not result in them having to account for their actions”.
Reports from the Zimbabwean human rights monitors – the Amani Trust and the Catholic Commission for Justice and Peace – confirm that these are not isolated cases. The US human rights watchdog, the Institute of Peace, corroborates that torture is “rampant” and “systematic”.