The following is a CPJ press release: ANGOLA: MARQUES TRIAL ADJOURNED TO MARCH 23 AMID GROWING DOUBTS ABOUT FAIRNESS New York, March 21, 2000 — The trial of Angolan free-lance journalist Rafael Marques, which was last adjourned on March 10, resumed today at 9:30 in the Provincial Criminal Court in Luanda, sources in Angola told […]
The following is a CPJ press release:
ANGOLA: MARQUES TRIAL ADJOURNED TO MARCH 23 AMID GROWING DOUBTS ABOUT FAIRNESS
New York, March 21, 2000 — The trial of Angolan free-lance journalist Rafael Marques, which was last adjourned on March 10, resumed today at 9:30 in the Provincial Criminal Court in Luanda, sources in Angola told CPJ.
After 30 minutes, Judge Joaquim de Abreu Cangato excluded the public from the courtroom. Officials from the US and Portuguese embassies, several human rights activists, and journalists were among those in attendance, until they were all forced to leave. Judge Cangato has no legal training, according to CPJ’s sources.
The trial continued all day in secrecy. At the end of the hearing, a visibly exhausted Marques told friends and reporters outside the courtroom that the trial had been adjourned until Thursday, March 23.
Judge Cangato has been presiding over the Marques trial since it began in early March. A former member of the Angolan secret police, Cangato has apparently never studied law or any related discipline.
Marques, 28, and two co-defendants have been charged with criminal defamation in connection with published articles critical of President José Eduardo Dos Santos. Police arrested Marques on October 16, 1999, at his Luanda home, and charged him with defamation over an article titled “The Lipstick of Dictatorship,” which ran under his byline in the July 3, 1999, edition of the independent newspaper Agora.
The article claimed, among other things, that President Dos Santos was responsible for “the destruction of the country… [and] for the promotion of incompetence, embezzlement and corruption as political and social values.” Marques also referred to the president as a “dictator.”
If convicted, Marques faces from two to eight years in prison.
