Mozambique: Renamo Joins Campaign Against Attorney-General

	Email This Page Print This Page Comment on this article

Agencia de Informacao de Mocambique (Maputo)

11 March 2008
Posted to the web 11 March 2008

Maputo

Mozambique's main opposition party, the former rebel movement Renamo, is trying to prevent the new Attorney-General, Augusto Paulino, from addressing the country's parliament, the Assembly of the Republic.

It is a constitutional obligation that every year the Attorney-General gives a report to the Assembly, and Paulino's first report is scheduled to be debated during the current parliamentary sitting.

But Renamo deputies are using the fictitious allegation that Paulino stole 300,000 meticais (about 12,500 US dollars) when he was presiding judge of the Maputo Provincial Court as an excuse to bar him from the Assembly. They even want President Armando Guebuza to revoke the dispatch appointing Paulino as Attorney-General.

On Monday, as the Assembly debated its agenda for this sitting, Renamo deputy Luis Boavida claimed that it was a violation of the constitution for Paulino to remain at his post. Boavida demanded that Assembly chairperson Eduardo Mulembue negotiate with Guebuza "to find a solution" to the problem of how the Attorney-General's report would be presented.

He even claimed that the Supreme Court has confirmed that Paulino "is a suspect in criminal proceedings".

This claim is breathtakingly false. On February 26, two Supreme Court judges, Luis Mondlane and Norberto Carrilho, ordered the case against Paulino to be shelved, because there was no evidence that any crime at all had been committed.

This was the fourth time that senior legal figures had found that the claims made against Paulino, by a court official named Adelaide Muchanga whom he had demoted, have no basis in fact. In August last year, the Higher Council of the Judicial Magistrature (CSMJ), the body that appoints, promotes, disciplines and supervises judges, heard the complaint, and found there was no evidence of any wrongdoing by Paulino.

Undeterred, Paulino's enemies in the Public Prosecutor's Office laid a charge against him before the Supreme Court, in a flagrant attempt to prevent Paulino's appointment as Attorney-General.

The Supreme Court judge in charge of the investigation, Joao Trindade, called witnesses, and he too concluded that there was no evidence that any crime had been committed. As Mozambican legal procedures demand, he sent the case back to the Public Prosecutor's Office - and an Assistant Attorney-General, Erasmo Nhavoto, issued a dispatch declining to press charges.

When Mondlane and Carrilho considered the case, their task was not to put Paulino on trial, but merely to decide whether they agreed with Nhavoto's dispatch. And they did. They agreed with Trindade that there there was no crime. No money had been stolen.

Without a crime, Paulino cannot be a suspect. Without a charge sheet, he cannot be an accused person.

Yet on Monday Renamo deputies were attempting to subvert the judicial system by calling for the Attorney-General to be removed over completely fictitious allegations.

Luis Gouveia read out an article of the Constitution which states that if the Attorney-General is involved in criminal proceedings, he should be "compulsorily retired".

Of course, the Constitution is referring to real crimes, not imaginary ones. But this was of no importance to the Renamo benches who cheered as Gouveia backed Boavida's demand that Mulembue "negotiate" with Guebuza over the issue.

"This is very serious and unconstitutional", blustered a third Renamo deputy Ismael Mussa. But Mulembue cut him off, ruling that since the Renamo deputies were not actually calling for the agenda to be changed, there was no point in continuing the discussion.

Meanwhile, the CSMJ is taking legal action against the pro-Renamo weekly "Zambeze", which has been running a libelous campaign against Paulino since mid-December.

Paulino wrote to the CSMJ in January, asking it to reprimand the paper for publishing "repeated libels" against him. The CSMJ, has agreed that the accusations in "Zambeze" are indeed libelous.

The CSMJ recalled that its own investigations into the case, back in August, showed that there was nothing that required any disciplinary or criminal proceedings against Paulino, and that Muchanga's denunciation had been made in bad faith.

The CSMJ said that "Zambeze'"s coverage of the matter manipulated public opinion, giving a false picture that Paulino was not suited to the job of Attorney-General. In doing so, the paper had violated the duties of journalists as envisaged in the 1991 press law.

The CSCS has demanded that "Zambeze" publish its ruling in the issue immediately following reception of the document - i.e. in the issue published this Thursday. Failure to do so, it warns, could lead to criminal proceedings against the paper.

Pf/ (740)

Read comments. Write your own.

AllAfrica aggregates and indexes content from over 125 African news organizations, plus more than 200 other sources, who are responsible for their own reporting and views. Articles and commentaries that identify allAfrica.com as the publisher are produced or commissioned by AllAfrica.

Share this on: Facebook Digg Del.icio.us StumbleUpon Muti

Copyright © 2008 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.

Make allAfrica.com your home page | RSS Feed Sign up for FREE daily 'top headlines' by email >>

Top | Site Guide | Who We Are | Advertising | Search | My Account

Questions or Comments? Contact us. Read our Privacy Statement.