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Mozambique: Powers of Corruption Office Restricted
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Agencia de Informacao de Mocambique (Maputo)
12 December 2007
Posted to the web 12 December 2007
Maputo
Mozambique's Attorney-General Augusto Paulino has announced a drastic reduction in the scope of action of the Central Office for the Fight against Corruption (GCCC).
The GCCC, which operates out of Paulino's office, has come under criticism from judges for usurping the powers of provincial attorneys and for pursuing economic crimes that do not fall within the definition of corruption.
Speaking at a meeting of the Consultative Council of the Attorney-General's Office, held in the central city of Beira, Paulino said the GCCC had to concentrate on its main task - so he had removed from the GCCC "cases of forgery, swindles, murders, theft among others".
Reported in the Beira daily paper "Diario de Mocambique", Paulino added that he had "altered the procedures" followed by the GCCC and "restored the role that the provincial attorneys' offices had lost". He had thus "held back the attempt to transform the GCCC into a parallel Attorney-General's Office".
A dispute had blown up earlier in the year as to whether the GCCC has the power to bring charges before courts - Paulino's predecessor, Joaquim Madeira, thought that it did. Judges disagreed - the bodies they recognized as prosecutors were the district, provincial and national attorneys' offices.
Paulino's view on the matter is clearly that the GCCC collects the evidence, but the task of prosecution remains in the hands of the various Attorneys' offices.
Paulino, who has only been in the job since August, also declared that "radical measures" have been taken to speed up the criminal justice system. The screening of suspects, to see who should be prosecuted, and the summary trials of petty offenders were now to be held by magistrates in the police stations.
Also speaking at the opening session of the meeting, Sofala Provincial ?Governor Alberto Vaquina noted that most of the complains that his office receives from citizens concern the administration of justice.
And it was no good telling citizens that the judiciary is completely independent of the government, for people still tended to blame the government for anything that went wrong in the legal system.
"The way in which justice is exercised, or at least the way people perceive and interpret it, has a great weight in citizens' opinions about the performance of the government", said Vaquina. "Among the general population, the difference between the executive and the judicial powers is so tenuous that it is difficult to distinguish one from the other".
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Many people still imagined that it was the government's job to solve every conflict arising in society, he continued, which was not possible under the rule of law. And since it was government officials who are in regular context with the public, the government found itself held politically responsible for the performance of the judiciary.
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| Copyright © 2007 Agencia de Informacao de Mocambique. All rights reserved. Distributed by AllAfrica Global Media (allAfrica.com). To contact the copyright holder directly for corrections -- or for permission to republish or make other authorized use of this material, click here. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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