News: Africa
» 2008
August 19, 2009
A Nuremberg for Guantánamo
AT the end of World War II, the Allied powers found themselves in charge of thousands of captured enemies, many of whom had committed unspeakable crimes. Some among the victors thought that the prisoners should simply be shot. Others, including many in the American government, steadfastly insisted that these men should be subjected to criminal proceedings. Thus the Nuremberg trials were born, tribunals that meted out justice for some of the 20th century’s worst atrocities while demonstrating the return of the rule of law on the European continent and the superiority of democratic values over Fascist lunacies. The Guantánamo detainees pose a similar conundrum today.
Read Op-Ed article by Guénaël Mettraux in the New York Times (USA)
Comment: As Guénaël Mettraux points out in this article, by giving a fair trial to the Guantánamo detainees, the United States would reassert its core values and bring the nation back within the tradition of law and justice that it so forcefully defended during WWII and the subsequent Nuremberg trials. In the same way, the principle of law and justice forms the backbone of the campaign for a trial against the pharmaceutical drug cartel. “A Nuremberg for the Pharma Cartel” would ensure that the fraudulent business model of the pharmaceutical drug cartel is finally ended and that the health and interests of six billion people and all future generations would be placed above those of the special interests behind the business with disease. To learn what you can do to help bring about such a trial, click here. To send your personal testimony, click here.
July 31, 2009
Pfizer to Pay $75 Million to Settle Trovan-Testing Suit
Pfizer signed a $75 million agreement Thursday with Nigerian authorities to settle criminal and civil charges that the pharmaceutical company illegally tested an experimental drug on children during a 1996 meningitis epidemic. Nigerian authorities say Pfizer's test of the antibiotic Trovan killed 11 children and disabled scores more. Pfizer says the deaths and injuries were the result of meningitis. An attorney for the state of Kano, where the charges were lodged, said the settlement was a long time in coming but welcome because it set the record straight about Pfizer's culpability.
Read article in the Washington Post (USA)
Comment: Eleven children died after taking Pfizer’s drug Trovan, which is also alleged to have caused deformities including blindness, deafness, brain damage and paralysis in 189 others. Although Pfizer has now reached agreement with the Kano state on this matter, charges filed against Pfizer by Nigeria's federal government, which is seeking about $6 billion in damages, are unaffected by the settlement. Two lawsuits related to the Trovan experiment also remain pending in New York.
July 19, 2009
Calls for probe into Dr. Kelly's 'suicide'
A US Air Force linguist joins a host of doctors in demanding a new probe into the mysterious death of a British scientist and weapons expert who opposed the Iraq war. The controversy surrounding Dr. David Kelly's death was first rekindled following a Daily Express report in June that revealed the expert was in the middle of writing a book containing damaging government secrets on the Iraq war as well as biological warfare in apartheid South Africa. The linguist, Mai Pederson, who was part of Kelly's weapons inspection team in Iraq, has called on the Attorney General for England, Wales and Northern Ireland to carry out an 'independent' review of the case, reported the Mail on Sunday.
Read article on the Press TV website (Iran)
July 10, 2009
Medvedev given first coin of future supranational currency at G8
Russian President Dmitry Medvedev said on Friday he had been given an example coin of a possible global currency at the G8 summit in Italy, adding that all aspects of reserve currencies were under discussion. "We are discussing both the use of other national currencies, including the ruble, as a reserve currency, as well as supranational currencies," the Russian leader said at a news conference following the G8 summit. Medvedev showed reporters an example of a coin of a supranational currency, which he called a "united future world currency."
Read article on the RIA Novosti website (Russia)
July 5, 2009
Kelly’s Book Of Secrets
Weapons inspector David Kelly was writing a book exposing highly damaging government secrets before his mysterious death. He was intending to reveal that he warned Prime Minister Tony Blair there were no weapons of mass destruction anywhere in Iraq weeks before the British and American invasion. He had several discussions with a publisher in Oxford and was seeking advice on how far he could go without breaking the law on secrets. Following his death, his computers were seized and it is still not known if any rough draft was discovered by investigators and, if so, what happened to the material. Dr Kelly was also intending to lift the lid on a potentially bigger scandal, his own secret dealings in germ warfare with the apartheid regime in South Africa.
Read article in the Daily Express (UK)
May 26, 2009
Shell's N.Y. trial over Nigerian deaths delayed
NEW YORK - A civil trial over the alleged involvement of giant oil producer Royal Dutch Shell Plc in the executions of protesters in Nigeria in the 1990s has been delayed until next week, a court clerk said on Tuesday.
Read news report at reuters.com
Comment: The lawsuit brought against Shell alleges that it was complicit in the execution of Ken Saro-Wiwa, a well-known activist, who, along with other protestors, had been campaigning against ecological damage caused by oil extraction. Saro-Wiwa and eight other campaigners were executed by hanging in November 1995 following their conviction by military tribunal on what were widely seen as trumped-up charges.
April 22, 2009
Jacob Zuma will take office under a cloud of doubt, says Desmond Tutu
Jacob Zuma will take office as South Africa's president with clouds of "doubt" hanging over his head, Archbishop Desmond Tutu has told The Daily Telegraph. As South Africans voted in an election that Mr Zuma, the leader of the African National Congress, is almost certain to win, Archbishop Tutu declared that corruption allegations against the future president should have been tested in court.
Read article in the Daily Telegraph (UK)
April 4, 2009
Nigeria: Pfizer and Kano opt for out of court settlement
Nigerian federal gov’t had sued for an additional $6.5bn
The outstanding court case between Kano, a northern Nigeria State, and Pfizer, a U.S drug firm, has been further postponed to 25th of May, 2009, and both parties have now agreed to sort things out away from the courtroom. Representatives of both sides have come to a settlement but have yet to work out the details. "I want to report that broad and principal fundamental agreement has been reached between Kano State government and Pfizer," said Anthony Idigbe, Pfizer’s lawyer. Nigerian families in Kano had sued Pfizer saying that the company tested out an oral antibiotic labeled as Trovan on some 200 sick children, without first getting the consent of their parents.
Read article at afrik.com
March 10, 2009
Waiting to Helm South Africa: President or Convict? Or Both?
JOHANNESBURG — If all goes as expected, South Africa will soon be led by a president who is also the defendant in a criminal case, a man accused of fraud and racketeering, legally empowered to select officials who could either drop his prosecution or push it forward.
Read article in the New York Times (USA)
February 12, 2009
Attorney Continues Long Battle With Pfizer Over Nigerian Drug Experiments
A new chapter begins in the battle over 'a diabolical scheme' that is the subject of the book and movie, 'The Constant Gardener'
West Haven, Conn., attorney Richard Altschuler has reams of paper and endless boxes of notes that tell the story. Medical experiments on children. Claims that a large American pharmaceutical company exploited a third world country. Sounds like the plot of a novel? It was. The book is called "The Constant Gardener." A movie of the same name followed in 2005. But the thing is, both were based on reality, on a case that Altschuler has been fighting for eight years against Pfizer Inc. He claims that the pharmaceutical giant secretly tested a new drug during a 1996 meningitis outbreak in Nigeria with devastating results.
Read article at law.com
February 4, 2009
Zuma defiant as court sets graft trial date
ANC leader Jacob Zuma said Wednesday he would not step aside ahead of presidential elections despite corruption charges overshadowing his bid for South Africa's presidency.
Read article at africasia.com
Comment: The court’s decision to set an August 25 date for Zuma’s corruption trial means he will not be tried before the presidential election expected in April.
February 4, 2009
Zuma in court threatens SA’s moral fibre
If ANC leader Jacob Zuma is in court facing corruption charges while president, it would threaten South African society’s moral fibre, an analyst said today. "It is going to suck the moral content out of society," said Prince Mashele, a political analyst from the Institute for Security Studies. Mashele said the president of a nation was "the embodiment of national values". If Zuma, as state president, goes to court then "the nation will be on trial when he is in court", he said.
Read article in The Times (South Africa)
February 2, 2009
Split 2nd Circuit Revives Nigerian Families' Claims Against Pfizer Over Drug Tests
Majority calls dissent's approach to 'customary' international law 'unselfconsciously reactionary and static'
African families' damage claims for billions of dollars against Pfizer for allegedly secretly testing a new drug in a Nigerian hospital during a 1996 meningitis outbreak were revived Friday by a divided federal appeals court. The ruling allows 88 Nigerian families to pursue claims under a law adopted in 1789 that gives foreigners the right to raise tort claims in federal court to vindicate violations of "the laws of nations." In 89 pages containing numerous barbed comments, the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals majority and dissent differed over whether the families' claims that their children had been subjected to medical experimentation without their consent fell within the 18th-century law.
Read article at law.com
January 29, 2009
S.Africa's Zuma may seek immunity from prosecution
South Africa's ruling party leader Jacob Zuma may seek immunity from prosecution if his legal team fail to convince prosecutors to drop graft charges, his lawyer said on Thursday. These charges have dogged Zuma for years and muddied his presidential ambitions ahead of general elections in 2009. Zuma's African National Congress party faces its first serious challenge since apartheid ended in 1994 from the Congress of the People (COPE), formed by influential ANC defectors.
Read news report at reuters.com
January 12, 2009
SCA opens the door for new Zuma charges
The judgment that quashed African National Congress President Jacob Zuma's prosecution - and led to ex-president Thabo Mbeki's ousting from office - is in tatters. Five Supreme Court of Appeal judges on Monday morning unanimously overturned Judge Chris Nicholson's ruling that Zuma's prosecution was invalid because the National Prosecuting Authority had failed to invite the ANC leader to make representations about the criminal allegations against him before charging him. Nicholson's judgment was the basis on which Thabo Mbeki was fired as president.
Read article on the Independent Online website (South Africa)
Comment: The Supreme Court of Appeal judges’ ruling opens the way for Zuma to face new corruption charges within months - just before the next South African general election at which he is expected to stand for the post of president.
January 6, 2009
The ANC's Secret COPE Sympathisers
The ANC is no longer sure of who is friend or foe. Some of its traditional members and ardent supporters are quietly vying for the Congress of the People (COPE) while pretending to be all for the ANC in public. Come the day of the secret ballot, they will have already turned. Some have already made the leap. Others are waiting for when the time is right to join COPE more openly. And, yet others simply have a genuine concern about South African democracy and its future and will vote for COPE to weaken the dominance of the ANC.
Read article at allafrica.com