Kangaroo/monkey kourt (in)justice T-TPLF style
Last week, young Ethiopian bloggers collectively known as “Zone 9 Bloggers” (named after a cell block holding political prisoners at the infamous Meles Zenawi Kality Prison, a few kilometers outside of the capital) returned to the kangaroo/monkey kourt system of the Thugtatorship of the Tigrean People’s Liberation Front (T-TPLF) for the 33rd time since April 2014.
(Ethiopia is the ONLY country in the world where the police arrest and detain a criminal suspect and then go out looking for evidence of wrongdoing for months and even years!)
“Justice delayed is justice denied.” Justice delayed 33 times is justice denied 33 times.
Justice delayed 33 times while the young bloggers are held in prolonged pretrial detention, denied bail, effective assistance of counsel, speedy trials and an impartial fact finder is a travesty of justice.
In anticipation of Barack Obama’s visit in July, the T-TPLF released two bloggers and 3 journalists.
Since 2006, I have been writing about the T-TPLF kangaroo (monkey) kourt system.
I wrote my first commentary in December 2006 entitled, “Keystone Cops, Prosecutors and Judges in a Police State.” That commentary examined the “trials” of the “Kality defendants” (opposition leaders) jailed by the late Meles Zenawi following the 2005 election.
In December 2007, I wrote “Monkey Trial in Kangaroo Kourt” examining the “trial” of Daniel Bekele (manager of ActionAid International in Ethiopia at the time), presently Executive Director of the Africa Division of Human Rights Watch, and Netsanet Demessie who founded and directed the Organization for Social Justice in Ethiopia. I compared their “trial” to the grim and chilling fictional story of Joseph K., in Franz Kafka’s The Trial.
I have written numerous commentaries on the T-TPLF’s Banana Republic and its monkey kourts for years.
In June 2014, I wrote a commentary entitled, “Who is afraid of the Ethiopian bloggers?, on the legal plight of the Zone 9 bloggers.
I use the metaphor of “kangaroo” and “monkey” kourt to describe the T-TPLF’s (in)justice system, not out of malice, but out of necessity for descriptive precision.
The phrase “kangaroo court” has nothing to do with the marsupial kangaroos of Australia.
The phrase is said to have originated in the American West in the 19th century to describe bogus, sham and phony judicial proceedings run by self-proclaimed judges.
The phrase has often been defined as 1) “a mock court in which the principles of law and justice are disregarded or perverted”, 2) “a court which blatantly and intentionally disregards recognized standards of law or justice”, 3) a “court held by a legitimate judicial authority who intentionally disregards the court’s legal or ethical obligations”, and 4) a court projecting the “appearance of a fair and just trial, even though the verdict has in reality already been decided before the trial has begun.”
The T-TPLF judicial system fits all of the foregoing definitions to a T.
The phrase has found its way into one of the most important landmark criminal constitutional cases in the U.S. legal history. In In Re Gault, the U.S. Supreme Court condemned a judicial process “where police take matters in their own hands, seize victims, beat and pound them until they confess. It is the right of the accused to be tried by a legally constituted court, not by a kangaroo court”.
That is the essence of the T-TPLF’s kangaroo courts. T-TPLF police thugs arrest suspects in political crimes on instruction of the T-TPLF political bosses, place them in detention, beat the hell out of them and extract confessions, delay filing charges, deny them counsel and shuttle them to and fro before judicial hacks appointed by the T-TPLF, deny them speedy trials and force them to languish in vermin-ridden jails for months or years as hack judges grant endless continuances to “prosecutors” to gather (fabricate) evidence on the suspects.
Kangaroo courts on Planet T-TPLF become monkey kourts.
To read the rest of the commentary, CLICK HERE.