Was the President Framed?

Abstract

This paper considers the witness statements used to incriminate President Kenyatta of Kenya in the recent International Criminal Court (ICC) trial. All of the witness statements analysed, supposedly written by people present at meetings or scenes of violence, were either fabricated or plagiarised, or both.This is a serious indictment of procedures used in international criminal trials. The author, a forensic linguist and law graduate, has worked on previous international cases where similar problems were encountered.It is not intended as an indictment of the ICC or other courts: prosecutors are placed under huge pressures to get results, and investigations become unwieldy very rapidly. However, if international justice is to work at all, the methods of collecting and assessing evidence need to undergo a radical, perhaps even cosmic, change for the better. If this is not done, international justice will simply become an academic topic and not a reality.