“The Ruto trial will likely be remembered for the reported efforts to corrupt witnesses. The ICC has issued arrest warrants for three individuals on charges of witness tampering in this case, and they should be surrendered to the court to answer these charges,” Liz Evenson, senior International Justice Counsel at Human Rights Watch stated moments after the ICC judges vacated charges against Ruto and Sang on Tuesday.
Politicisation of the ICC case was also another issue that legal experts believe led to the collapse of the ICC cases.
Whereas the experts cannot agree if it was the prosecution or Kenya that politicised the case and how the politicisation improved or weakened the cases, they concur that the Kenyan cases were unnecessarily dragged in politics of Kenya, corridors of the ICC and the Assembly of State Parties (ASP) discussions.
The judges in their decision to vacate charges against Ruto and Sang declared the proceedings as ‘mistrial due to troubling incidence of witness interference and intolerable political meddling’.
Kenyan politicians have also been accused of making utterances to undermine the court’s intervention in the Kenyan situation.
According to Kersten, the Kenyan cases were the most politicised cases of the situations that the court has handled before.
“A lot of people will view this as a break for the ICC, very few cases – perhaps no case has ever so severely embroiled the ICC in politics – and controversy as the Kenya cases.”
Korir on the other hand alleges that attempts by the prosecution and Trial Chamber V (a) to employ application of Rule 68 on use of evidence of recanting witnesses which the ASP had agreed it would not be used retrospectively, was politicising the case.
In what he refers to as ‘legal gymnastics,’ he alleges that the court resulted to ‘legal revisionism’ to save a case that lacked basis.
“You can see a case that was built on quick sand from the word go and every effort was made to sustain – to hold it together lest it collapses. But the weight of the contradictions were so overwhelming that even with all the propping up that the case was subjected to surely it could not hold any longer,” Korir argued.
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