Burkina Faso lawyers on strike to contest the arrest of their colleague Guy-Hervé Kam

Burkina Faso lawyers on strike to contest the arrest of

This figure of the Burkinabè bar has been kidnapped and kept in secret since January 24, for no apparent reason. Arbitrary arrest which follows numerous others in the country.

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Mr. Kam’s lawyers turned to the attorney general for explanations, but he claims not to be aware of the lawyer’s fate or the reason for his arrest.

Since Guy-Hervé Kam is deprived of his liberty, his fellow lawyers will not go to the courtrooms this Thursday. At the call of the President of the Order, Siaka Niamba, all lawyers in the country are called to strike. This was also decided during an extraordinary general assembly of the Order on February 7 in Ouagadougou.

A protest relayed at the international level since the Conference of Bars of the UEMOA area in Dakar, Abidjan, Lomé and Cotonou also denounced this arrest. “ For more than two weeks, a lawyer and, moreover, a rights activist has been arrested in totally unacceptable conditions. For those who know the situation of lawyers in the UEMOA area, this way of doing things is totally incomprehensible and a total violation of their rights. », Indignant Master Mamadou Ismaila Konate, Malian lawyer and former Minister of Justice.

A violation of individual rights in Burkina Faso which is not the only one in most putschist regimes in the area, regrets the Malian lawyer. “ It becomes like DNA. This is what we are told about the system of democracy: “democracies were biased before because elections were rigged”. It’s true. But the substitute for democracy are military transition regimes at the head of which people settle in the name of the kepi, in the name of the braid, in the name of weapons and decide to do whatever comes to mind in saying that it is in the name of patriotism, in the name of the State. »

If Guy-Hervé Kam is kept in secret, he is not the only one. For weeks, we have still had no news from the politician Albasse Ouedraogo, the human rights defender Daouda Diallo or the soldier Evrard Somda.

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