Justice :”Relentless” with opposition and “tolerant” with Frelimo, says CDD

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Justice :”Relentless” with opposition and “tolerant” with Frelimo, says CDD

7:48 CAT | 27 Apr 2021

File photo: DW

The Centre for Democracy and Development (CDD), a Mozambican civil society organization, accuses Mozambique’s justice authorities of being “relentless” with opposition political figures, but “tolerant” with those of Frelimo, the ruling party.

In an analysis released this Monday (26-04), the CDD notes the sentencing last week of Nampula’s Renamo mayor, Paulo Vahanle, to 18 months of imprisonment, commuted to a fine, as an example of the lack of justice regarding political figures who do not belong to the Liberation Front of Mozambique (Frelimo), the party in power.

For the CDD, “the promiscuity between the instituted powers leads the public sphere to look at Vahanle’s conviction as yet more proof of the capture of the judiciary by the political power, namely Frelimo”.

“In plain language, Vahanle was convicted because he is from Renamo,” the report on the CDD website reads. “This reading gains plausibility within a logic in which, when it comes to leaders elected by Frelimo being indicted for crimes of corruption, they are either not accused or, when they are, they end up being acquitted due to insufficient evidence,” the report asserts.

Relentlessv.dw_ — *Paulo Vahanle reacts to the sentence on leaving the court. “Agnaldo Rui Navalha’s only crime is being a member of the MDM”*

In Dondo municipality, Sofala province, central Mozambique, the Public Prosecutor and the district court saw nothing wrong with the performance of the Frelimo mayor, Manuel Navalha, and the first party secretary in that district, José Cheiro, in a lawsuit filed on charges of the crimes of simulation and undue payments.

“Alerted about the great blemish that the prosecution had caused in the ‘unpolluted’ Frelimo, the Public Prosecutor in Dondo performed legal acrobatics and, on the day of the final allegations, reduced the crimes of simulation and improper payments to an error of an administrative procedural nature,” the CDD alleges.

In the province of Gaza, southern Mozambique, a young man, Agnaldo Rui Navalha, a member of the Democratic Movement of Mozambique (MDM), the third-largest political part in Mozambique, was sentenced to 12 years in prison for arson in the Chicumbane Administrative Post, Limpopo district, despite the defendant never participating in the demonstration that culminated in the destruction of the private property listed in the indictment, a CDD analysis reads.

“Agnaldo Rui Navalha’s only crime is being a member of the MDM,” the CDD observes, accusing the Superior Court of Appeal of having “ignored” the appeal filed by Agnaldo Rui Navalha’s defence against his conviction, which only “increased the family’s belief that the young man is the victim of political persecution”.

Paulo Vahanle, one of the nine opposition mayors in Mozambique, and elected to office by RENAMO, was sentenced to 18 months in prison commuted to a fine for abuse of office, in the context of a court case in which he was accused of authorising several unwarranted payments.

Source: Deutsche Welle