The prosecution for human rights abuses of Chad's former dictator is a test case for Africa and its participation in the quest for international justice, writes Eva Dadrian Starting this week in Addis Ababa, the 2007 African Union (AU) summit faces decisions that will be crucial to its credibility. The conflict in Darfur and the crisis in Somalia are top issues on the agenda of the pan-African organisation, but human rights activists will also be expecting to see whether the AU summit will review Senegal's progress in the case of Hissène Habré, the former Chadian dictator who is under house arrest in the Senegalese capital awaiting trial. Last year, Senegal's President Wade agreed to an AU decision that Habré be put on trial in Senegal and the Senegalese government announced the establishment of a commission to prepare the trial and the revision of laws necessary to permit it. To date, the Senegalese assembly has not taken up the bill. If Habré is brought to justice, Africans' hopes of seeing other despots answer to their crimes will increase. But scant are the mechanisms or competent courts to deal with such judicial matters. The tribunal in Arusha, Tanzania, judging the perpetrators of the Rwandan genocide is a dire example of, if not incompetence, inadequate judicial mechanisms and funds. If globalisation is a catchword denoting increasing inter- linkages between peoples, economies, and cultures, it also is a phenomenon that has affected the practice of justice. Indeed, justice is no longer "exclusively local" as Adama Dieng, UN assistant secretary-general and registrar for the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, acknowledged at the "Justice in Africa" conference held back in 2001. Arguably, the globalisation of justice is among the most groundbreaking aspects of the evolution of human rights standards in the past decade; a new concept of human rights that places individuals not only as subjects of human rights protection, but objects of "accountability" for crimes against humanity, war crimes, genocide and torture. With or without the complicity of their former backers, a few African dictators have escaped being brought to justice for grave human rights abuses, finding refuge in friendly countries. Topping the list of notorious leaders are Zaire's Mobutu, who died in Morocco in 1997, Uganda's Milton Obote, who died last year after spending many years exiled in Tanzania and Zambia, and Idi Amin Dada, blamed for the death of hundreds of thousands of Ugandans in the 1970s and who found refuge in Saudi Arabia and died there in 2003. If Mobutu, Idi Amin and Obote escaped justice, three of their peers did not: Liberia's Charles Taylor, Chad's Hissène Habré, and Ethiopia's Mengistu Hailé Mariam. For Charles Taylor, an internationally brokered deal that offered him provisional safe haven in Nigeria fell apart last year and under fierce international pressure Nigeria's President Olusegun Obasanjo handed Taylor over to The Hague to answer 11 charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity. If Taylor's capture, extradition and indictment were hailed as a victory for international justice, the failure to try Taylor in Sierra Leone or Liberia hindered public participation in the pursuit of international justice and negated the trial's impact on regional reconciliation. Public opinion in the continent is wholeheartedly eager to bring Habré and many others to justice and strongly disagrees with African heads of states giving sanctuary to former dictators, like in the case of Ethiopia's Mengistu who has found sanctuary in Zimbabwe since 1991. As of last November, after a 12-year trial whereupon the Ethiopian Federal High Court handed a life sentence to Mengistu on genocide charges, Zimbabwe announced that it would not extradite him. Mengistu's refusal to recognise the legal basis of the trial, accusing those who overthrew him of being mercenaries and colonisers, mirrored scenes of the trial of Iraq's President Saddam Hussein, held under US occupation. Back in Addis Ababa, the fact that AU leaders have agreed that Habré be put on trial in Senegal is a step forward in the quest for justice in Africa. They will come under fire, however, if they fail to muster the requisite political will to move beyond rhetoric and press towards action.
