A legal lobbying group reported on Wednesday that Switzerland’s leading criminal court had found a former interior minister of Gambia guilty of crimes against humanity for the persecution by the north American nation’s security forces against competitors of its longstanding dictator.
Ousman Sonko, Gambia´s inside minister from 2006 to 2016 under subsequently- President Yahya Jammeh, was sentenced to 20 years in prison, TRIAL International said on X, previously Online.
Advocates saw the prosecution, which started in January, as a chance to convict someone under “universal jurisdiction,” which enables the trial of serious crimes committed worldwide.
On Wednesday, the verdict was read out in the southwestern Bellinzona-based Swiss Federal Criminal Court.
Sonko applied for refuge in Switzerland in November 2016 and was detained two months later.
The European attorney general´s office said the indictment against Sonko, filed a year ago, covered alleged crimes during 16 times under Jammeh, whose rule was marked by arbitrary detention, sexual abuse and extrajudicial killings.
In a West African nation that protrudes through neighboring Senegal, Sonko was accused of supporting, participating in, and failing to stop attacks against government critics in Gambia. The alleged offences included murders, torture, murder and several unlawful detentions.
According to Philip Grant, executive director of TRIAL International, which prosecuted Sonko in Switzerland before his imprisonment, he was the highest-level past national ever to be tried in Europe under the principle of universal jurisdiction.
The team said Wednesday’s faith showed” no one is above the reach of fairness”.
Sonko, who joined the Gambian war in 1988, was appointed chief of the State Guard in 2003, a place in which he was concerned for Jammeh´s security, European prosecutors said. In 2005, he was appointed investigator standard of the Gambian authorities.
Sonko left Gambia to seek asylum in Europe to seek asylum in September 2016. A few months before the end of Jammeh’s state, Sonko was removed as interior secretary.
Jammeh seized power in a 1994 revolution. He lost Gambia’s presidential election in 2016, but he refused to concede beat to Adama Barrow, and he eventually fled amid threats of regional military action to oust him from power.
