JURIST - Paper Chase: Sunday, October 17, 2010

[JURIST] The Dubai Court of First Instance [official website] has ruled that a former Nigerian Delta state [official website] governor can be extradited to the UK to face charges of money laundering, fraud and embezzlement. James Ibori was arrested [BBC report] in the United Arab Emirates by INTERPOL [official website] in May. Nigeria's Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) [official website] accused Ibori of stealing Delta state funds [CP report] worth $292 million during his time in office. These funds were allegedly filtered through banks in the UK, which led the UK Metropolitan Police [official website] to issue a warrant for his arrest [NEXT report]. Ibori has appealed the decision to Dubai's Civil Court of Appeal.

Ibori is not the first Nigerian state governor to be accused of misappropriating state funds. In December 2007, Ayodele Fayose, former governor of the state of Ekiti [official website], was arraigned on corruption charges [JURIST report] stemming from an accusation that he embezzled 1.2 billion naira (USD $7.8 million) from the state. Fayose surrendered to the EFCC after going into hiding following his 2006 impeachment. At that time, the EFCC announced it was currently investigating 15 former state governors for alleged corruption and indicated in October 2007 that at least six would be charged [JURIST report]. Also in 2007, Human Rights Watch (HRW) [advocacy website] released a report [JURIST report] finding that corruption and violence permeating the Nigerian government had reached crisis levels, threatening Nigerian democracy.

[JURIST] The former president of the ruling Democratic Party of Japan [official website], Ichiro Ozawa, filed a lawsuit Friday seeking to overturn corruption charges brought against him last month. The Tokyo No. 5 Committee for the Inquest of Prosecution, an 11-member body composed of members of the public without legal backgrounds [Mainichi Daily News report], voted for the second time in September to overrule a prosecutor's decision not to bring charges against Ozawa. The charges are related to the false reporting of over ¥ 700 million [The Japan Times report] in relation to the purchase of land for Ozawa's political fund management group, violating the Political Funds Control Law [text, in Japanese]. The suit, filed in the Tokyo District Court [official website, in Japanese], argues that the committee which indicted Ozawa did not follow proper procedure in overruling the prosecutor's decision. It also criticized the fact that the committee's sessions are conducted behind closed doors and the members are not identified. The court has asked the Daini Tokyo Bar Association [official website] to recommend a lawyer to act as prosecutor, despite Ozawa's requested injunction against the appointment of a prosecutor to pursue the charges. Charges have been brought against Ozawa in relation to the case twice before, but were dropped both times due to lack of evidence. The Prosecution Commission Act [text, in Japanese], governing the Committees for Inquest of Prosecution, was changed in May, allowing the body to overrule the prosecutor's decision on whether to bring charges. The prosecutor had not wanted to proceed against Ozawa due to the failure of the past attempts to prosecute him.

Despite having a relatively low level of official corruption [JURIST report], Japan has faced high profile corruption cases in the past. In 2008, the Tokyo District Court sentenced former Japanese administrative vice defense minister Takemasa Moriya to two and a half years in prison for accepting bribes and committing perjury [JURIST report] after Moriya pleaded guilty to accepting approximately $126,000 worth of illegal benefits from a military contractor. In May 2007 Agriculture Minister Shinichi Yamazaki committed suicide [Times report] after being called before a parliamentary committee to answer allegations of embezzling over $200,000 in state funds.

[JURIST] Amnesty International (AI) [advocacy website] released a report [text, PDF] outlining fairness concerns the group has with the 2001 conviction of the "Cuban Five" [advocacy website; JURIST news archive]. The men - Fernando Gonzalez, Gerardo Hernandez, Ramon Labanino, Antonio Guerrero and Rene Gonzalez - were convicted of acting as Cuban intelligence agents. The men are currently serving sentences ranging from 15 years to life in US federal prisons. They were arrested in 1998 in Miami and were charged and convicted of various offenses, including acting and conspiring to act as unregistered agents of the Cuban government and fraud and misuse of identity documents. Hernandez was additionally charged and convicted of conspiracy to commit murder for his role in the shooting down of a plane carrying members of the US anti-Castro organization Brothers to the Rescue [advocacy website] in 1996, resulting in four deaths. AI's fairness concerns center around the fact that the men were tried in Miami, which AI alleges prevented the men from receiving a fair trial due to local hostility to the Cuban government and undermined their access to an impartial jury, explaining:

Miami is home to the largest Cuban exile population in the USA and there is no doubt that the trial took place in a venue where there was substantial, even uniquely extensive, community hostility to the Cuban government, then led by Fidel Castro. There were also strong local connections to the Brothers to the Rescue organization, the deaths of four of whose members formed a key part of the prosecution's case. Both before, during and after the trial, the defendants sought to have the trial moved to Fort Lauderdale, less than 30 miles away, in motions which were denied by the district court.

AI also alleges that the evidence used to convict Hernandez of conspiracy to commit murder was not strong and that all of the men received limited access to their attorneys and documents during pre-trail detention. AI sent the report [press release] to US Attorney General Eric Holder [official website], urging him to "review the case and mitigate any injustice through the clemency process or other appropriate means, should further legal appeals prove ineffective."

The men admit that they were working as Cuban spies, but say that they were watching the activities of exile groups opposed to former Cuban president Fidel Castro [BBC profile], rather than the US government. In December, a judge for the US District Court for the Southern District of Florida reduced Labanino's life sentence [JURIST report] to 30 years and reduced Gonzalez's sentence from 19 to 18 years in prison. The judge had previously reduced Guerrero's sentence from life to 22 years in October 2009. These reductions came after the US Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit ruled in 2008 that the sentences were excessive. In 2005, a panel of the Eleventh Circuit ruled that the trial in Miami was biased [JURIST report] due to community prejudice and extensive media coverage. The US government appealed that decision and a rehearing was held before the full appeals court, which upheld [JURIST reports] the convictions. The US Supreme Court has declined to hear an appeal [JURIST report] in the matter.