Mozambican judges demand security

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Mozambican judges demand security

6:10 CAT | 11 May 2016

O País / Judge Carlos Mondlane (centre) presided a seminar on Organised Crime and the challenges it presents to Justice bodies

Mozambican judges on Monday called for the creation of a special force to ensure the security of magistrates, reports Tuesday’s issue of the independent newssheet “Mediafax”.

The demand came at a seminar on organized crime, held by the Mozambican Association of Judges (AMJ), to mark the second anniversary of the assassination of judge Dinis Silica, gunned down in broad day light at a set of traffic lights in central Maputo on 8 May 2014. Silica was known to be handling a sensitive case concerning the wave of kidnappings of business people that had hit Mozambican cities since late 2011.

More recently, on 11 April this year, a senior prosecutor, Marcelino Vilanculos was murdered outside his home in the southern city of Matola. He too had been working on the kidnappings.

Currently, judges are supposed to be able to call on the police to protect them. But AMJ chairperson Carlos Mondlane pointed out that this did not seem to be working, “So we shall ask the government to provide a force to protect judges whenever requested”, he said,

Such a request would be far from outrageous: Mondlane pointed out that there already exists within the police a special unit for the protection of high ranking state figures.

“We want this force to protect individuals whose activity is to guarantee justice, and this task falls to judges and prosecutors”, he said. “It makes no sense that judges are unprotected when they are dealing with extremely serious cases of organized crime”.

He regarded crimes such as the assassinations of Silica and Vilanculos as “an attack on the cornerstones of the machinery of the administration of justice”.

“We are living through a situation in Mozambique today in which judges are scared, prosecutors are scared, police officers are scared, and as representatives of the repressive machinery of the state, we must not allow any kind of weakness to appear towards those who work for organized crime”, Mondlane said.

The chairperson of the Mozambican Bar Association (OAM), Flávio Menete, called for better coordination between the various bodies in the administration of justice, and for measures to prevent the infiltration of the police by individuals “whose conduct does not measure up to the moral and legal demands of the police force”.

Source: AIM