Korir Sing’Oei, Legal Advisor, Executive Office of the Deputy President argues that Ocampo rushed to put up a case without solid evidence to support his allegations against the six hence the crumbling trend of the two cases.
“It’s fair to say that the Kenyan cases collapsed from the word go. They were never meant to be before the ICC. You have a case from the word go that completely begins to collapse on its sills,” he told Capital FM News.
Mark Kesten, a researcher at the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto feels that evidence used to secure confirmation of charges was already too weak to stand trial against Ruto and Sang especially in a highly politicised situation between Kenya and the ICC.
“The cases themselves were not that strong to sustain that kind of political interference with witnesses in the first place. In a sense the case was not built on enough different witnesses when some of them – then these cases very quickly became almost too weak to be sustained through a criminal trial process,” Kersten explains.
He explains that the prosecution should have looked beyond approval to investigate and confirm charges to ensure its evidence could at least stand trial.
“One of the reasons why cases can get exposed later is that at that initial evidence that you have collected and that the prosecutors and investigators have collected is simply is strong enough for an arrest warrant or to request summons to appear but simply not strong enough to get a conviction or to go through a trial properly which seems to be the case again with Kenya,” Kersten explained.
The defence of Ruto and Sang had throughout the trial proceedings accused the prosecution and investigators of relying on secondary evidence put together by different groups in Kenya instead of conducting independent investigations.
“The prosecutor had ‘random reports’ and that’s basically what formed the basis of the initial action. Then the prosecutor – he used same witnesses that participated in a fairly highly charged political process in Kenya to become his witnesses,” Korir argued.
It is for that reason, he says, that several prosecution witnesses recanted their evidence, withdrew or admitted that they had been coached to fix the accused persons.
The prosecution has however denied the allegations and chided that the accused persons bribed and intimidated witnesses hence the withdrawals and recantation.
Civil society groups have also theorised on the prosecution’s argument that witnesses were interfered with to deprive the prosecution of its evidence, the reason why the case against Ruto and Sang collapsed.
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