Mozambique: Judges told to end impunity for criminals – AIM report

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Mozambique: Judges told to end impunity for criminals – AIM report

7:23 CAT | 28 May 2021

Photo: O País

The President of Mozambique’s Supreme Court, Adelino Muchanga, on Thursday urged judges to take decisions that will close down the organised crime networks that are a major concern for Mozambican society, reports the independent television station, STV.

Speaking at the ceremony to lay the first stone for a new district court in the central city of Quelimane, Muchanga said “the trafficking in drugs or in protected species of wildlife, and the kidnappings, cannot be dissociated from money laundering and, in the final instance, from financing the terrorism that is plaguing our country”.

He told the Quelimane judges “every judicial decision we take sends a message to the criminals and to society’.

If the message sent by the courts was one of total impunity, he warned, then this would make Mozambique fertile ground for organized crime.

But, if the message, was one “of firmness that in Mozambique there is no place for impunity, and we insist instead on the values of honesty, integrity, and independence, that will enshrine strategically the principles inherent to the rule of law, as a legal regime founded on the supremacy of the rights of the people, and on guarantees of the effectiveness of fundamental rights”, Muchanga declared.

The judiciary, he insisted, is called upon to provide the best possible justice, for the good of the public

The Quelimane ceremony was the start of providing a modern court building in the city under President Filipe Nyusi’s initiative “for each district, one building worthy of a court”.

Out of the 22 districts in Zambezia province, seven do not yet possess premises for the proper functioning of courts, which means that over a million people have restricted access to judicial services.

But Muchanga promised that, within the next two years, this situation will pass into history, and every Zambezia district will have its own court house.

Source: AIM