A Geneva court has rejected the appeal of six members of Cameroon president Paul Biya’s security detail who were convicted for assaulting a Swiss journalist during the president’s visit last year.

Robert Assaël, the lawyer of one of the defendants, confirmed reports of the judgment in local Geneva media on Tuesday. He added that the Geneva appeals court had violated international law with the judgment as the president’s staff enjoys diplomatic immunity, preventing them from criminal prosecution.

“It doesn’t matter if the head of state was on a private visit, was inside the hotel and was not approached [by the journalist].”

The journalist from Swiss public television, RTS, was assaulted by the president’s entourage in front of the InterContinental Hotel, where Biya was staying during a visit to Geneva in June 2019.

The journalist said members of Biya’s security team took his bag containing a mobile phone and wallet. The seized items were later returned. He sustained minor injuries.

‘Unacceptable’

The incident took place during a demonstration outside the hotel where Biya was staying by a group of protesters. The assault prompted Switzerland to summon the ambassador of Cameroon to Bern, where he was told that “such incidents are unacceptable, and that freedom of the press is protected and must be respected”.

The six employees were initially arrested in June 2019 and given suspended prison sentences. In July, Geneva prosecutors found the individuals (five men and one woman) guilty of coercion, damage to property and illegal appropriation. The Geneva judiciary found no justification for the response by Biya’s team.

According to reports in the French-language paper La Tribune de Genève, the defendants plan to appeal to the federal court.

Source: Swissinfo

Over 1200 delegates accredited the conference. Over 72,000 people engaged via online streaming.

International guest speakers included a former head of state, former ambassadors and active parliamentarians from 7 different countries in Africa, the U.S.A and Europe. 

28+ panelists from across the globe contributed on 5 different panels on key topics relevant to the armed conflict in Southern Cameroons.

Over 820 Southern Cameroon experts registered, while over 500 actively participated in the 7 Working Groups created by the CDN.

The Working Groups sub areas included: Education, Peace and Security, Health and Humanitarian, Judiciary and constitutional affairs, Economic reconstruction, Governance, Mediation and Negotiations.

Over 3700 Southern Cameroonians from around the world, but with a majority from Southern Cameroons took part in a historic survey that highlighted the political and governing preferences for Southern Cameroonians.

In the coming days the Coalition for Dialogue and Negotiations will be making public a complete report of the conference.

“We were sitting in a bar that evening when about 60 people burst in,” says Appolin Tchanga, a 43-year-old house painter. “I was stabbed with a knife – I came close to death.” Changa bears scars on his chest, inflicted when a gang swept through a neighborhood in Douala, Cameroon’s economic capital, in June.

 Gang violence in the city is on the rise both night and day, with roving bands touting machetes, clubs, knives and even screwdrivers to terrorize and steal. “The problem is rising,” said a police officer who asked not to be named. “If nothing is done, they are going to be taking entire districts hostage.”

The brazen violence in this port city of some 3.7 million people hardly makes headlines abroad – Cameroon’s far bloodier conflicts in its restive anglophone west and jihadist-troubled Far North region are more newsworthy. The toll of casualties from the gang raids is unknown, but last month alone, at least four districts suffered such attacks. “They beat up traders, stole goods and people’s possessions,” a vendor said in the rundown Ndokoti district. “People stampeded. I ran off like everyone else and hurt myself,” said another trader, who gave his name as Prince.

 Angry, fearful and frustrated at what they see as official indifference, locals are taking matters into their own hands. In the lively Deido district, a raid was recently carried out by two dozen youths mainly armed with knives, according to Nicolas Njoh, general secretary to the chief of the district, which includes several villages. “They smashed up shops. They snatched women’s handbags,” Njoh says. But when gang members made a second assault on the area, local residents were ready for them, Njoh explains. “When the signal was given, all the children and the mothers moved out. The gang members were hunted down,” he says, showing a photo of a motorbike driver who had been caught. The district had already formed a local self-defense council, but Njoh says that as gang violence has increased, officials are looking to install “a watchdog committee in every village for a strong counter response.”

 After the wave of attacks in Deido, 39 delinquents were rounded up and jailed, says Samuel Dieudonne Ivaha Diboua, governor of the Littoral Region where Douala is the chief city. Not everyone agrees with a lock-them-up approach. Most of the people who operate in gangs “are young,” said Erero Njiengwe, a psychologist and researcher at the University of Douala. “They come from a delinquent generation – they are out of work, abandoned, mistreated in a certain way.” A better approach would be “to identify them and get them to turn towards productive activities rather than favoring repression”.

Source: AFP

The road crash occurred in the western city of Cameroon on Sunday

Former Barcelona and Inter Milan striker Samuel Eto’o is in stable condition after he was involved in a road accident around Nkongsamba-Douala road in Cameroon.

Eto’o was said to be returning from a wedding celebration when his car was hit by a public transport bus on Sunday morning.

Although the car was badly damaged in the front, the 39-year-old was immediately moved to a hospital where he is doing well under the doctors’ watch.

According to France Football, the Barcelona legend suffered a head injury but no life was lost in the crash.

Eto’o who is a special adviser to Caf President Ahmad Ahmad, announced his retirement from football in September 2019 after a playing career that spanned 22 years.

Source: Goal.com

The US is expected to fly Cameroonian asylum seekers back to their home country on Tuesday despite fears that their lives will be at risk and reports that deportees repatriated last month are now missing.

Some of the deportees are activists from the country’s anglophone minority, who face arrest warrants for their political activities from government forces with a well documented record of extrajudicial killings. They and their lawyers refer to Tuesday’s flight as the “death plane”.

Lawyers, human rights groups and Democratic senator Chris Van Hollen have appealed to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to halt deportation flights to Cameroon while political violence is still widespread there and while at least some of the detainees have cases pending or motions to reopen cases before the Board of Immigration Appeals.

US Ice officers ‘used torture to make Africans sign own deportation orders’

They expressed concern that the deportations were being rushed to clear African asylum-seekers out of the country by the end of the Trump presidency, as part of a scorched earth policy in the administration’s final weeks.

There are also allegations of systematic abuse by agents of the DHS’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), often to force the asylum seekers to sign their own deportation orders, and waive their right to pending immigration hearings. In one case, detainees were allegedly put under showers and then tasered by ICE agents, leaving some in need of hospital care.

The deportations are taking place despite a finding last year by the US government that the Cameroon government “engages in gross violations of internationally recognized human rights”. The state department deferred questions about the upcoming deportations to ICE.

“Due to operational security, we are only able to confirm removal flights once they have landed in the designated country,” an ICE spokeswoman said.

“The immigration laws of the United States allow an alien to pursue relief from removal; however, once they have exhausted all due process and appeals, they remain subject to a final order of removal issued by the agency, an immigration judge or the Board of Immigration Appeals, and that order must be carried out.”

However, according to their lawyers, seven of those due to be on the plane had current motions to reopen appeals and one had a case pending before the immigration appeals board. Advocates argue that legal outcomes for asylum seekers are a lottery. Nationwide, 80% of applications from Cameroonians are successful, but certain judges have records of rejecting over 90% Cameroonian asylum cases.

About 38 men and 10 women are scheduled to be on Tuesday’s flight, 37 of them Cameroonian, but also six Angolan and three Congolese asylum seekers. In recent days they have been moved from prisons across the south to Prairieland Detention Centre in Alvarado, Texas, in preparation for a charter flight out of Fort Worth.

‘I will be killed’

One of those due to be deported, Daniel, said his brother had been shot in 2019 by Cameroonian security services searching for him, and his father had been crippled by torture in prison. His other siblings are missing

“I will be killed by the Cameroon government,” Daniel (a pseudonym used to protect his family) told the Guardian by telephone from Prairieland.

He was a member of a separatist group called the Southern Cameroon National Council. It describes itself as a non-violent group but he said many of his fellow members had been killed or imprisoned, in the counter-insurgency the government is waging against anglophone separatists. He said he was sent a photograph of his brother’s body while he was in detention.

Daniel said he was detained and tortured in 2014, and then arrested again in 2017, but he bribed his way out of prison and fled the country, eventually finding his way, after a transatlantic flight and a gruelling, dangerous trek across South and Central America to the US-Mexican border. He has been in US detention ever since.

“For us you have always been a country of freedom, who looked after vulnerable people,” Daniel said, referring to the US. “There is an active war happening in Cameroon, and I don’t think it is American values just to send people back to be killed”.

Van Hollen, Democratic senator for Maryland, wrote to the acting DHS director Chad Wolf, on 6 November pointing out that violence in Cameroon is escalating.

“It’s obviously alarming that they would schedule these flights given the violence in Cameroon, and the very high risk that anybody deported to Cameroon would become the victim of violence,” he told the Guardian.

“We are bringing this to their [DHS’s] attention so they are not going to be able to plead ignorance.”

The senator said his letter to the DHS director that many of the 57 Cameroonians deported on a ICE flight on 13 October, “now live in hiding for fear for their lives, or have not been heard of since leaving the US.”

According to a news report from Cameroon, the returnees were detained by government security forces after their flight arrived in Douala and their whereabouts are now unknown. Lawyers and family members told the Guardian that at least two deportees had bribed their way out of detention and had gone into hiding.

Torture allegations

Human rights organisations allege that in ICE prisons, some of the detainees were tortured into signing, or putting their fingerprint on, their detention orders.

A complaint from the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Freedom for Immigrants advocacy group cited six cases of alleged abuse at the Jackson Parish Correctional Facility in Louisiana against Cameroonian detainees scheduled to be on the Tuesday deportation flight, including an inmate identified by the initials BN, who said he was stripped while his fingerprint was taken by force.

“During that time, the women officers were holding my feet. My genitals were completely naked and exposed. I was naked in front of many people – there were over 10 people there, including the women,” BN said. “I felt ashamed.”

In separate complaints, the Immigrants Rights Clinic at the Texas A&M School of Law, cited alleged abuses at the Adams County Correctional Centre in Mississippi. An Angolan inmate identified as AC, also due to be on the Tuesday flight, said his fingerprint was taken by force and he witnessed the torture of other detainees at the prison’s solitary facility, the security housing unit (SHU).

“During his time there, he saw ICE bring African detainees to the SHU, put them in the shower, get them soaking wet, and then they use the ‘electric pistols’ (tasers) on them until they passed out,” the complaint says. “He was terrified that they would do this to him, which is why he eventually gave in when he was being physically abused and signed and gave his fingerprints.”

“We know that many of the people who are at risk of deportation have been abused in ICE custody, particularly in the jurisdiction of the New Orleans field office,” Fatma Marouf, the director of the clinic, said, adding the deportees were terrified of what awaited them after Tuesday’s flight.

“I think the risk to the Cameroonians is very serious,” Marouf said. “Many of them were beaten by the military before as they were part of separatist movements. Some of them were leaders in their communities. I think they really do fear for their lives going back.”

Immigrant rights organisations say there has been a rush in recent weeks to deport African asylum seekers in particular.

“This is consistent with the way the Trump administration is trying to rush many decisions in these closing weeks of the administration,” Van Hollen said, pointing to eleventh-hour steps to erase environmental regulations, and politicise the civil service. “What we’re seeing from the Trump administration in their dying hours is a rush to do as much damage as possible.”

Source: The Guardian

Hundreds of villagers have deserted a village in Cameroon’s English-speaking Southwest region after rebels attacked, killed their chief and torched his palace Friday evening. The fleeing civilians are asking for help in neighboring towns. The incident took place a day after another English-speaking chief was abducted. His whereabouts are still unknown.

Palm oil merchant Isaac Njoh, 52, says he fled from Liwu La-Malale in Cameroon’s English-speaking Southwest region after heavily armed rebels attacked the village and set the chief’s residence on fire.

 He says villagers were attending a meeting with their traditional ruler when heavily armed men attacked and started shooting in the air. He says the armed men set the palace buildings on fire, but the villagers were able to escape safely. He says many villagers who escaped to the neighboring town of Buea have nowhere to stay?

Malomba Esembe, who represents the area in Cameroon’s National Assembly, says the rebels butchered Molinga Francis Nangoh, village chief of Liwu La-Malale. 

“This is another affront to the sacredness of human life, to the solemnity of traditional institutions and to the sorrow of a people who are still mourning their children who were wickedly slain in Kumba on October 24. I am disturbed by this news and hereby convey my deepest sympathy to the people of Liwu La-Malale. I condemn in the strongest terms this act of wickedness for one other life lost is one too many,” he said.

Cameroon’s government has confirmed the killing and blamed separatist fighters. No one has claimed responsibility.

Bernard Okalia Bilai, governor of the Southwest region called for calm and said the military has been deployed to secure the area and find the killers. He asked the fleeing civilians to return.

In September, Cameroon territorial administration minister Paul Atanga Nji held a series of meetings and asked chiefs who fled separatist conflicts to return to their palaces.

Atem Ebako, chief of the English-speaking southwestern village of Talangaye says the attack on a chief and the burning of his palace will scare traditional rulers from returning to their villages to participate in the December 6 regional election as requested by the government.

“The minister made it abundantly clear to us that it would not be properly seen that the regional council elections that are coming for which the real actors are chiefs, that such an event is taking place and the chiefs are outside. That the government is going to put up a package to accompany the chiefs back to their palaces and we are still expecting that to happen,” he said.

 Chiefs suspected of collaborating with the central government in Yaoundé to fight the rebels have been victims of attacks from suspected rebels since the conflict worsened in 2017.

At least 11 village chiefs have been killed and 17 abducted and released since then. Hundreds escaped to safer localities and began returning to their palaces in September when the government assured them of their safety.

 Last month, some of the chiefs started creating armed militias for protection against separatists for the first time.

The government asked militias created by chiefs to collaborate with government troops by informing the military of any strange movements or visitors in their villages, but separatist groups on social media promised to kill chiefs who create militias. The separatists said any chief who collaborates with the central government in Yaoundé will not find peace should they return home.

On November 5, Sehm Mbinglo, traditional ruler of the Nso people who was returning to his palace after two years of absence was abducted. Catholic cardinal Tumi, who was accompanying Mbinglo, was also abducted but later released. Mbinglo’s whereabouts are unknown. 

The rebels have been fighting to create an independent, English-speaking state in Cameroon’s western regions since 2017.   At least 3,000 people have been killed and 550,000 displaced, according to the United Nations.

Source: VOA