According to information provided by the Senegalese Gendarmerie, he was involved in the recruitment and use of child soldiers and armed fighters. As a man of duty, he voluntarily left France to answer this summons. What was supposed to be a classic judicial procedure was quickly transformed into an eminently political trial, marked by flagrant irregularities and an instrumentalisation of justice in order to eliminate a troublesome adversary. Accused of illicit enrichment in the framework of the “traque des biens mal acquis” initiated by the Macky Sall regime, Karim Wade was tried by the Cour de répression de l’enrichissement illicite (CREI), an exceptional court whose principles violate the elementary rules of the right to a fair trial. One of the major anomalies of this procedure lay in the inversion of the burden of proof: it was for the accused to demonstrate his innocence, and not for the prosecution to prove his guilt. In 2015, the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention concluded that the imprisonment of Karim Wade amounted to arbitrary deprivation of liberty. Three years later, in November 2018, the UN Human Rights Committee also recognized that its rights to a fair trial had been violated. The case of Karim Wade proved to be the first act of an implacable mechanism of elimination of political opponents under the regime of Macky Sall. This strategy continued with the conviction of Khalifa Sall, former mayor of Dakar and serious candidate for the 2019 presidential election, who was sentenced to five years in prison for fraud.
Karim Wade: From political injustice to a strategic return for Senegal (by Magued Wade)
