Ousmane Sonko’s camp seemed to have already prepared the jubilation of the verdict that Judge Sabassy Faye of Ziguinchor would deliver. In the end, the magistrate ordered the re-registration of the leader of the former Pastef party on the electoral lists. The outcome of this trial did not seem to be the subject of the slightest doubt, as the supporters of Ousmane Sonko and his advisers had given, with great media support, indications that could not be clearer, about their inevitable victory.  They thus landed in Ziguinchor, to put on a show and prepare for the jubilation. They somehow betrayed themselves by also announcing, to anyone who would listen, that the verdict rendered on October 6, 2023, by the Supreme Court, confirming the removal of Ousmane Sonko’s name from the voters’ register, was not important and that only the one to be handed down by the Ziguinchor judge will be decisive on this question. For once, Ousmane Sonko and his lawyers showed a priori confidence in a judge!

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But the State of Senegal cannot be surprised. It already had the means to know, through its official channels and tools, what was going on, not to mention that already, on October 6, 2023, I was able to alert a high government authority about the risks of seeing the planned trial in Ziguinchor for October 13, 2023, turn to an embarrassing defeat for the State of Senegal. My interlocutor showed a revolting casualness: “We know, they are not serious but God is with us!” I was therefore not surprised to see that no provision was made to allow for the proper distribution of Justice. I then took it upon myself to reveal on social media the family relationship that could appear likely to taint the sincerity of the verdict. Is it not that in the case opposing Adji Sarr and Ousmane Sonko for rape, his lawyers had systematically challenged any judge or prosecutor having a social or family relationship with a member of the government or any political official belonging to the ruling majority?

They were therefore taken by surprise by the revelation about the bond of brotherhood between the judge and a close collaborator of Ousmane Sonko. Their own weapons were returned to them. For lack of argument, they tried to discredit my information by publishing on numerous other networks a truncated list of deputy mayors, deliberately omitting the name of Saër Faye. The deception will be exposed with the publication of the real list of deputy mayors. All they had to do was play on an error concerning the name because in my first tweet, I spoke of Saliou Faye instead of Saër. Indeed, the spell checker on my phone may have played tricks on me; no doubt the device was obviously more accustomed to writing “Saliou” than “Saër”! Never mind! Everything is good to seek to manipulate and deceive public opinion, because no one has been able to question the relationship mentioned. Ultimately, the deputy mayor is not called Saliou but Saër, and remains the brother of the judge!

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The fact remains that the State Judicial Agent submitted a request to the First President of the Court of Appeal of Ziguinchor to disqualify the judge. The request for recusal was immediately notified to Sabassy Faye who, despite everything, decided to ignore it and continue her trial. As if stubbornly determined to move on and deliver a verdict? A retired and most respectable judge in this country (I can say this having worked under his orders), no doubt taken aback by the posture of his young colleague, could not help but share with me these few words spoken by a senior magistrate, during a debate on the occasion of “The Night of Law at the Council of State”, on October 6, 2023, broadcast on a French television channel: “We are in a state of scruple and ethical requirement, when we approach a case, because we know that we are handling a prerogative that has been given to us and of which we are only the transitory custodians and we know that we intervene in the lives, the fate of people (Justice is rendered in the name of the People). The first, the very first limit of the judge, is virtue, it is ethics, the requirement that the Republic places on those who serve it, not to exceed the limits.

A lesson of history: should not the dignity of a judge suffer from rendering a verdict, while there persists a legitimate or illegitimate suspicion (it depends) concerning the interest that his own brother could have in a case? Although if we did not take it upon ourselves to withdraw, as others have had to do in other cases, should not the simplest courtesy lead us to postpone the hearing and wait for the opinion of the First President of the Court of Appeal, thus seized?  The craziest is reserved for the end of the trial. Indeed, after more than twelve hours of debates and pleadings, and especially given the importance of such a case on which the Supreme Court had to rule a week earlier, Judge Faye rendered an expeditious verdict, in five minutes flat. Moreover, the immutable principle is to advocate speed in the distribution of Justice, but should judges be so expeditious? Who does not remember that in the case of Mame Mbaye Niang against Ousmane Sonko for defamation, judged in Dakar, judge Mamadou Yakham Keïta was just as expeditious, deliberating on March 30, 2023, on the bench, to render his verdict; this, against all good judicial practices?

This case should never have been judged in Ziguinchor!

We can consider that Ousmane Sonko’s supporters are lying to themselves, by claiming a victory which can only be symbolic or provisional. There is no doubt that the Supreme Court, before which this decision of Judge Sabassy Faye is referred, cannot reconsider the question of the removal of Ousmane Sonko from the voters’ register. In any case, the government has already announced that it refuses to comply with the decision of the Ziguinchor judge. If the Supreme Court’s judgment is delayed, the risk would be to see the question become irrelevant or obsolete, in the event that the dispute is not resolved within a time frame that would allow Ousmane Sonko to catch up with the electoral process. for the Presidential election in February 2024. This affair may have provoked an outraged reaction from the Union of Magistrates of Senegal (UMS) which criticizes the terms contained in a press release from the Judicial Agent of the State of Senegal. The “pleader” on behalf of the State denounces the conditions for holding this trial.

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No one can therefore teach the UMS a lesson, which remains in its role as a corporatist organization, which undoubtedly cannot be neutral in the face of a controversy in the public square in which one of its members is caught up in. The UMS has the right and even the duty to provide him with support in principle but for all that, we are entitled to wonder whether the insults, attacks, offences, threats and intimidations regularly uttered by Ousmane Sonko, his supporters and his lawyers, towards magistrates, are systematically inaudible to the members and managers of this organization. Certainly, the UMS would certainly have also done the right measure or the right balance of the scales of Justice, if it had been, even a little, concerned about the atmosphere of threats and intimidation around the Palace of Justice from Ziguinchor. Bands of supporters of the city mayor, visibly armed, had stormed the scene to shout their anger and their demands for a favorable verdict. The magistrates, lawyers and other protagonists of the trial must have been concerned for their physical safety.

Reluctantly, in such a situation, Judge Sabassy Faye, who lives in Ziguinchor and who was able to observe that the public forces had not been able to prevent the physical attacks and the burning of residences of government figures in the city, could resign himself to rendering a verdict of comfort. Here too, the fault lies with the State authorities who failed to ensure the proper conditions for holding the trial in an environment of calm, serenity and security. The judges can get scared. In similar circumstances of the siege and attack on the Louga courthouse, during the judgment of a Koranic master from Ndiagne who had martyred one of his students, I rebelled in these columns, on December 2, 2019, maintaining that “the Louga Court will have judged but will not have delivered Justice”. This means once again that it is a serious mistake on the part of the State to have allowed this trial to take place in Ziguinchor. The least precaution would have been to request the “relocation” of this file to another jurisdiction such as Kolda, Tambacounda, Diourbel, Kaolack, Thiès, Saint-Louis, Matam or even…; a place where the security threats surrounding the trial would not have been so obvious.

We can say that this results more from improvidence or casualness, always culpable, especially since we have seen the State try to make up for it by an untimely request, late, for a challenge to the judge. The negligence (still culpable) with which certain legal procedures are followed by the highest authorities of the State can leave you speechless. It has happened, more than once, that in important cases, the Chancellery discovers at the same time as the common Senegalese, the requisitions of the public prosecutor’s office which go in a direction which surprises it, to say the least. The usual precautions should encourage the Ministry of Justice to seek to know what its prosecutors, general prosecutors, under its supervision, would have to say at the hearing and in the event that this is not appropriate, give them written requisitions in good and due form. Such another practice is authorized and used in all judicial systems around the world! What should the weekly coordination meetings with the prosecutors, under the aegis of the Ministry of Justice, be used for? The General Prosecutor’s Office of the Supreme Court is not statutorily « subject » to the Minister of Justice, it is independent, but for all that, should the Chancellery ignore its activities? Just as we can remain convinced that if the scandal of Judge Mamadou Yakham Keïta in the case cited above had been effectively handled by the Chancellery, if only in the sense of a request for an investigation by the General Inspectorate of the Administration of Justice (Igaj) in order, at the very least, to ensure the conditions for equitable distribution of the work of justice, no doubt that his colleague Sabassy Faye would have reflected twice before adopting the same attitude that stirs people in legal circles.

Judges who show themselves to be indelicate are applauded as heroes, while their colleagues, who stick to the priesthood of their oath, are seen in the eyes of a certain opinion as renegades or outcasts. The aberration is such that we saw, on social networks, two former prime ministers (Abdoul Mbaye and Aminata Touré), applauding judges for behaviour that conflicts with professional rules. We will say that with Abdoul Mbaye, it’s déjà vu, he congratulates the judges if they decide a dispute in his favour and insults them if they dismiss it. But it is sad and painful to see a former Minister of Justice, deny everything for which she had earned the esteem of her fellow citizens. Is it not Aminata Touré, Minister of Justice, who had the Cheikh Béthio Thioune file « removed », in 2012, from Mbour to Thiès, in the case of the murder of two of his disciples in Médinatoul Salam? The inmate Cheikh Béthio Thioune was also transferred from Thiès prison to Rebeuss prison in Dakar.

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Was it not Aminata Touré who unceremoniously defenestrated the Dakar prosecutor, Ousmane Diagne, who had inclinations to rebel against certain instructions from the Chancellery.  She tried during a Superior Judicial Council on January 22, 2013, but President Sall vetoed it. She returned three months later, in April 2013, to obtain the head of prosecution Diagne, this time, to persuade the head of state, a strong ally, the then Prime Minister, Abdoul Mbaye, who also had a grudge against the magistrate. Ousmane Diagne had taken legal action on a denunciation, made to the Prosecutor’s Office by the president of the Court in charge of family affairs, of a forgery offense against Abdoul Mbaye. The latter, in divorce proceedings between him and Amy Diack, had used a marriage document whose falsity was denounced by the other party. On August 30, 2018, upon Karim Wade’s request for the rejection of his registration on the electoral lists, Ousmane Diagne occupied the seat of the Attorney General at the Supreme Court hearing. In his indictment, he disavowed the General Directorate of Elections, considering that “Karim Wade has the right to register and that officials of the Ministry of the Interior cannot replace the judges who must decide on electoral questions”. This situation of Karim Wade at that time and that which occupies the news, of the removal of Ousmane Sonko from the electoral register, are similar!

Aminata Touré, Special Envoy of the Head of State, who led the endorsement collection campaign on behalf of candidate Macky Sall with a view to the 2019 Presidential Election, found that this new attitude of this magistrate was unfavourable to power, further legitimized his dismissal from the Dakar Prosecutor’s Office in 2013. It must be said that Aminata Touré was waiting for a « comeback » at a higher level of the state apparatus. She will be appointed president of the Economic, Social and Environmental Council (Cese). Tell me what lesson in respect for the independence of magistrates can these two personalities claim to give?

By Madiambal DIAGNE – mdiagne@lequotidien.sn