and poachers in his ranch, or the fact that he had been poisoned a few weeks prior to his
assassination.
149. At the Public Hearing
of 29 November
2013,
a Counsel
for the Respondent,
in
replying to a question from the Court as to why the Burkinabé authorities had not explored
the other avenues of investigation raised in the ICE report, stated that the Investigating
Magistrate had relied on the findings of the Independent Commission of Enquiry which
had focused, in a rather biased manner, on the sole target of members of the presidential
guard and had failed to identify any poacher, grazier or bandit who could have been
investigated - all issues which an Investigating Magistrate could not afford to ignore”.
150. The Respondent is compelled under article 7 of the Charter, which guarantees the
right to have one’s cause
efforts to search,
heard
prosecute
and
by competent
national courts, to make
bring to trial the perpetrators
murder of Norbert Zongo and his companions.
all necessary
of crimes
such
as the
The question therefore is, whether the
Respondent had fully complied with that obligation, and more specifically, whether it had
acted with due diligence.
151. All in all, it must
be
acknowledged
that in the case
of Zongo
and
others,
the
Respondent had continuously embarked on a number of actions intended to seek out the
suspected assassins,
including investigations at the scene of the crime; post mortem
examinations; forensic evidence; preliminary investigations; referral to an Investigating
Magistrate;
arrest of a suspect;
adversarial
procedure
between
the suspect
and
a
prosecution witness; hearing of witnesses; hearing of civil parties; and trial of the suspect.
152. However, a review of the case does reveal that there had been discrepancies in the
treatment of the matter by the local courts.
Firstly, from the Court’s own findings, it is clear that the first case of discrepancy lay in the
protracted duration of the proceedings, which stood at slightly less than eight years, given
the fact that the initial investigations started on the day of the assassination in December
1998 right up to the Order to terminate proceedings in August 2006. The Respondent
State was unable to convince the Court that that duration was reasonable in the peculiar
circumstances surrounding the matter, and given the possible resources available to the
42
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a- es