ATTORNEY-GENERAL PAINTS
SOMBRE PICTURE OF JUSTICE SYSTEM

Maputo, 7 Mar (AIM) - Mozambique's Attorney-General, Joaquim Madeira, on Wednesday painted a sombre picture of the country's legal system, pointing out "flagrant facts that lead to lack of credibility, distrust and even contempt for Mozambican justice".

Giving his annual report to the country's parliament, the Assembly of the Republic, Madeira pointed to incompetence, corruption and abuse of power at all levels of the administration of justice - police, attorneys, judges, lawyers and prisons.

Work done by the Criminal Investigation Police (PIC) was often of such poor quality, that the public prosecutor's office had to carry out supplementary inquiries of its own before it could draw up a proper charge sheet against suspects.

Much worse was corruption within PIC. "Cases concerned with theft from the state, from banks, and from other private bodies do not advance", said Madeira. "The papers disappear, and nobody knows about them because they're been shelved, hidden or even destroyed".

His office had received from the Bank of Mozambique a list of such cases that were supposedly with the Maputo City PIC. Months ago, Madeira's office had asked PIC for these cases "but so far we've had no reply".

Madeira argued that the only way to deal with serious anomalies within PIC is to take it out of the Ministry of the Interior, and put it under the direct control of the Attorney-General's Office.

As for Attorneys, Madeira said he continued to be surprised by those who failed to press charges against suspects, when there was more than enough evidence to haul them before court. Such tolerance smelt of corruption, he noted.

There were also prosecutors who took no initiatives, but just waited to be contacted about crimes that occurred within their area of jurisdiction. Disciplinary measures had been taken against such people, because this inertia made them accomplices to crime "and is incompatible with the duties of public prosecutors".

There were some prosecutors, he added, who in an entire year did not appear in court. There were judges too whose rulings paid no attention to the evidence produced, and who ordered "interminable extra investigations in order to drag out the cases deliberately, so that the accused will be released because the time limit for the trial has expired".

Madeira also said his office was aware of a case where a judge condemned a criminal to 12 months in jail: a relative of the criminal went to speak to the judge, and he promptly scaled the sentence down to 2 months.

Some lawyers too acted in a highly irregular way. "Some interventions by lawyers in criminal cases are a real distortion and obstruction of due process and of justice", accused Madeira.

There were lawyers who forbade their clients from making statements, even when the clients wanted to, and others who "smuggled in components of equipment that would allow their detained clients to communicate with the outside world".

No names were mentioned, but last year the lawyer Espírito Santo was accused of trying to smuggle a mobile phone into the cell of Momade Assife Abdul Satar, one of those accused of the November 2000 murder of Mozambique's best know journalist, Carlos Cardoso.

Madeira attacked the Mozambican Bar Association itself. The anomalies committed by lawyers, he said, although they offended against the ethics of the Bar Association, "rely on the protection, or at least the apathy, of the Association's leadership, which, although informed about these matters, has given no sign that it will do anything".

Some of Madeira's most severe criticisms were directed at the country's prisons. "Inmates escape from almost all the country's prisons, sometimes in a spectacular fashion", he said.

"Preliminary investigations indicate that these escapes enjoyed the connivance of prison guards, or were at least facilitated by their inexcusable negligence".

Some of the cases mentioned by Madeira indicate serious corruption: a woman prisoner serving a long sentence (whom he did not name) not only left the jail, but was provided with all the documents needed to flee to the United States.

In other cases, guards and prison directors severely abuse prisoners. Madeira spoke of the practice of using unpaid prison labour on farms belonging to the prison directors, and of a case in which a guard beat a prisoner to death.

One of the tasks of the Attorney-General's office is to inspect the prisons. Madeira said that in general the prisons are overcrowded, "with all the health problems that flow from that".

Thus the central prison in the Maputo suburb of Machava, has an installed capacity for 800 inmates. When it was last visited, on 23 October, there were 2,800 prisoners living there. Living conditions in the prisons "remain deplorable", said Madeira. He thought the solution was more open prisons, where inmates could produce food for their own sustenance.

Perhaps the worst aspect of Mozambican prisons is that most people incarcerated there have not been found guilty of any offence. They are simply awaiting trial.

One of the most bizarre reasons given for postponing trials is the lack of vehicles to take the accused from jail to the courtroom. In Maputo, this was "one of the main constraints on the administration of justice", claimed Madeira.

"The irregular functioning of the prison vehicles that carry detainees between the prisons and the courts severely hinders the timely holding of trials", he said. "The dates are marked for trails but they are not held, or when they are held it's much later than the time stipulated, which creates problems for everyone involved in the case".
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ATTORNEY-GENERAL PAINTS SOMBRE PICTURE OF JUSTICE SYSTEM