the State of Niger presented this title deed No. 18 to the Court, this document
was never communicated to the Applicants, who did not have the opportunity
to refute it.
22. In any case, the adversarial principle was not respected.
23. The Court rendered its decision in this proceeding based on the existence
of Title Deed No. 18 to dismiss the Applicants' property right claims.
24. In the initial application, the Applicants demonstrated that the State did
not raise this so-called title during several years of litigation; that it never
presented this title during the litigation; that Gountou Yena's ancestors have
no memory of the expropriation of their lands, and that despite active
research in the colonial archives of Dakar, no trace of such title has been
found.
25. The Respondent has never produced any document that would have
challenged this evidence.
26. The status of this document is essential because, if it does not exist or is
not valid, the State never had the right to dispose of the disputed parcel
through title deed No. 30637, the parcel title that it claims to derive from title
No. 18;
27. According to State documentation, the Applicants, who are the
customary occupants and owners, could not, therefore, be deprived of their
land without the provided protections.
28. According to the rule established by this Court in the case Mohammed El
Tayyibah v. Sierra Leone, if the Respondent submitted this disputed title
deed, the document should have been disclosed to the Applicants.
29. If the Respondent did not gather it to the case file, the Court should not
have based its Judgment on such Title Deed No. 18 without ordering the
Respondent to disclose it to the Court and to the Applicants to give them the
opportunity to refute it.
6