African lawyers hit Cape Verde Island over Alex Saab detention

Abuja,

The African Bar Association (AfBA) has asked Cape Verde Island to immediately release Ambassador Alex Saab, an accredited Venezuela special envoy and alternate permanent representative to the African Union.

The AfBA on Monday appealed to African heads of State and government to rise as a body and persuade Cape Verde Island to rescue itself from the diplomatic mud involving Venezuela and the US.

AfBA President Hannibal Uwaifo expressed the association’s concerns at the World Press Conference in Lagos, Nigeria, condemning Ambassador Saab’s detention since June 2020 for possible extradition to the United States.

He said the action violated global diplomatic virtues and statutes, as contained in the Vienna Convention.

Investigation findings

Cape Verde’s action, according to investigations by the Human Rights Committee and a review by the AfBA Executive Committee, was found below the accepted international rules of engagements.

The AfBA president described the detention of the envoy as unsanitary and unsalutary to Africa’s collective diplomatic decency and stature.

“We demand that Alex Saab be released immediately and that his persecution and chastisement in custody illegally in Cape Verde, merely to satisfy the whims of a superpower, be brought to an end immediately as ordered by the binding unanimous Ecowas court ruling on December 2, 2020.”

“We acted on the petition of Ambassador Saab’s wife, which revealed that besides her husband being a known cancer patient, he is denied his drugs and access to family and defense attorneys, and stripped of his diplomatic privileges against the Ecowas court injunction.

“Saab is viciously and frantically being packaged for delivery to the US by the Cape Verde government, facilitated by enormous pressure through a contrived extradition procurement, with unimaginable damage to our civility and civilisation, if ever allowed to stand on any African soil”.

AfBA’s stature

Mr Uwaifo noted that the AfBA is dedicated to the primacy of the rule of law, as the most disruptive evolution for human governance.

“Our moral and professional duty is relentless and persistent to see it respected, preserved and improved on, not liberally pissed upon as the case under reference by President Jorge Carlos Fonseca and Prime Minister Ulisses Correia Silva of Cape Verde”. 

“It is more pathetic that the choice for this scheme of intransigence is in Africa, by a sovereign African nation, a participatory signatory to the AU Charter on Human and Peoples Rights and Ecowas protocols, on a documented diplomatic citizen with no known crime and offence in the land of his capture, detention and incarceration.”

He said the action is an abuse of basic principles of the rule of law and “an aggravating circumstance for the intentional culpability by Cape Verde”.

What happened

The association said Ambassador Saab was detained while travelling from Caracas to Teheran on June 12, 2020. It said his plane had made a technical refuelling stop on the Cape Verdean Island of Sal when he was detained unlawfully.

On January 22, Venezuela’s Foreign minister advised Saab, a businessman close to President Nicolas Maduro, not to cooperate with US authorities.

The envoy is a Colombian national but has Venezuelan and Antiguan citizenship. He is accused by US prosecutors of money laundering in connection to an allegedly corrupt deal to obtain supplies for Maduro’s government-run food subsidy programme.

At the United States District Court for the Southern District of Florida, Ambassador Saab’s lawyers argued that he should not be considered a fugitive fleeing from justice in the US because Venezuela’s government named him a “special envoy” in 2018.

Venezuela's position

President Maduro’s administration maintained that the special envoy is in “violation of international law and norms.” 

His legal team, led by Nigerian lawyer Femi Falana, approached the Ecowas Community Court in Abuja and asked it to stop the US extradition request.

The court, in its ECW/CCJ/RUL/07/2020 ruling, affirmed Mr Saab’s diplomatic status and ordered his immediate release from prison and his transfer to permanent home detention.

It also ordered the suspension of “the extradition proceedings, pending a hearing on the substantive issues concerning his detention, which was scheduled for February 4.

But the Cabo Verde authorities are yet to obey the order as Mr Saab has remained in custody.

Meanwhile, reports indicate that Venezuelan citizens embarked on massive street protests against the envoy’s detention.

The protesters, numbering over 200,000 on February 3 hit the streets, accusing Cape Verde of committing illegalities by not respecting the ambassador’s immunity.