Chad: Habré Trial Is Litmus Test for Pan-African Justice.

From July 20th 2015, the former Chadian dictator, Hissène Habré, will stand in the dock on charges of crimes against humanity, torture and war crimes before the Extraordinary African Chambers (EAC) in the Senegalese court system. His trial will be Africa's first to proceed to trial under the guise of 'universal jurisdiction' - the principle that international crimes have no borders.

Its decisive start signals a judicial rendezvous with the ghosts of Chad's brutal past and will bring to a close a protracted legal drama, meandering through a myriad of jurisdictions. Next to being a catalysing forum for witness testimony, the Habré trial will above all be a litmus test for 'Pan-African' justice.

Glacial venture

"Je ne reconnais pas les faits qui me sont reprochés. Je n'ai jamais commis de tels actes." This renunciation was the single utterance that Habré wished to share with his litigant, Demba Kandji.

It was late afternoon on 3rd February 2000. In a courtroom in Dakar's Regional Court, the Senegalese Investigating Judge had just charged Habré as an accessory to torture and crimes against humanity and placed him under virtual house arrest. Hopes for justice were rising among seven Chadians who, in the days before, had testified before Kandji about political killings, torment, disappearances and arbitrary arrests under their former President's repressive rule. Kandji had moved fast.

Fearing Habré's flight, the Senegalese magistrate had summoned the survivors to recount their plight during two days of closed-door hearings. Only two days after the Chadians, supported by international human rights groups, had filed a criminal complaint against Habré for his "barbarous acts".

Finally, hearings for historic atrocity seemed set on the horizon. But attaining universal justice for old crimes is a glacial venture. It demands uncompromising determination. But above all, it requires endless patience (in Habré's case another fifteen-and-a-half years.)

Timing and venue had appeared to be perfect to pursue the 'Desert Fox' into a legal hole. The spirit of international justice filled the air in the late 1990s. Balkan war criminals and Rwandan génocidaires were being served judgements at the UN's ad hoc tribunals (ICTY & ICTR) in The Hague and Arusha. In Rome, in July 1998, 120 states endorsed the conception of the International Criminal Court (ICC), the world's first permanent court to pursue supposed criminals against humanity. Only a couple of months later, in London Bridge Hospital, the former Chilean martinet Augusto Pinochet was detained, based on a Spanish arrest warrant listing 95 counts of torture.

Senegal seemed an arena of imminent opportunity. The West African nation was an early subscriber to international law and human rights treaties. In February 1999, Dakar was the first state to ratify the Rome Statute. Back in 1985 it was among the first countries to sign the UN's Convention Against Torture, well ahead of a clique of western establishments. There was no better place to test the waters of universal jurisdiction than coastal Senegal. Its guinea pig was the exiled Habré, who had lived in Dakar since 1990, owning two mansions in the Ouakam and Mamelles neighbourhoods.

But the tide was ebbing. Politics eroded justice and Habré, who was soon dubbed 'Africa's Pinochet', was manoeuvred back into luxurious impunity. The gruesome victims' testimonies about torture in Habré's secret prisons - including 'Arbatachar', in which a prisoner's arms and legs were tied together behind the back - and how they had been forced to dig mass graves to bury Habré's opponents, rapidly eclipsed during Senegal's hotly contested elections.

While the zealous Kandji had started hearing further witnesses and was anticipating amassing more testimony and evidence in Chad, Dakar's appeal panels ruled out jurisdiction over the more than a decade old crimes, perpetrated roughly 4,500 km away. A month later, Abdoulaye Wade took office as Senegal's new President. But one of his closest judicial advisors was Madické Niang, who also happened to be Habré's lawyer. In June, Judge Demba Kandji was removed from the Habré investigation, followed by further dubious reshuffles in the judiciary. On 20 March 2001, flexibly framed legal reasoning shipwrecked the case at Senegal's highest court, the Cour de Cassation. Habré's prosecution in Senegal was played out: his tormenting phantoms were chased out of the courtrooms and footnoted into the annals of history.