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Mozambique: Isabel Rupia Suspended for 90 Days
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Agencia de Informacao de Mocambique (Maputo)
18 July 2008
Posted to the web 18 July 2008
Maputo
The Supreme Council of the Judicial Magistrature (CSMJ), the regulatory body for Mozambican judges, has suspended the former head of the Anti-Corruption Unit, Isabel Rupia, for 90 days, reports Friday's issue of the weekly paper "O Pais".
Rupia is a judge by profession, but several years ago she was seconded to the Attorney-General's Office. She was appointed an Assistant Attorney-General, and headed first the Anti-Corruption Unit, then its successor, the Central Office for the Fight against Corruption (GCCC). But in all the years that she headed these bodies she failed to bring a single case of corruption to trial.
Last year, after a new Attorney-General, Augusto Paulino, was appointed, all but one of the assistant attorney-generals were dismissed. There was nothing disgraceful about this, and Rupia should simply have returned to her work as a judge.
However, it was some months before she reported for work. As a result, a complaint against her for abandoning her post was lodged with the CSMJ.
The second complaint against her came from Paulino, who said she had broken the norms on the confidentiality of cases which are still under investigation. She had spoken to the right-wing weekly "Zambeze" about a case before the Supreme Court, in which Paulino was accused of stealing 300,000 meticais (about 12,500 US dollars) from state coffers.
"Zambeze" ran a virulent campaign against Paulino for months, and Rupia was one of the paper's sources. In the end, the Supreme Court exonerated Paulino, and found that the accusations against him were false and made in bad faith. By then the damage had been done, with the "Zambeze" stories being used by the parliamentary opposition as ammunition as they demanded that President Armando Guebuza sack Paulino.
According to "O Pais", senior figures on the CSMJ wanted to take much tougher measures against Rupia. The President and Deputy President of the Supreme Court, Mario Mangaze and Luis Sacramento, and a third Supreme Court member, Luis Mondlane, thought the charges were serious enough to warrant Rupia's expulsion from the magistrature.
But others, including veteran lawyer Domingos Arouca (elected to the CSMJ by the country's parliament, the Assembly of the Republic), and a former attorney general, Sinai Nhatitima, thought this would be an "extreme" measure. A compromise was reached whereby Rupia was suspended for 90 days. When "O Pais" asked her to comment, she said she had not yet been notified of the decision.
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The CSMJ took much sterner measures against two other judges accused of corruption. Crispim Meque dos Santos was expelled from the profession, while Carlos Asdrubal suffered the penalty of compulsory retirement. No details have yet been given of the exact nature of the charges against these two judges.
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| 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. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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