seven years later, a judgment against a third term for Nkurunziza resurfaces

Elected President of the Republic of Burundi in 2005, re-elected in 2010, Pierre Nkurunziza (1964-2020) decided in 2015 to run for a third term as head of state. A decision that plunged the country into crisis: demonstrations by citizens opposed to a third term, bloody repression and unprecedented…

The consequences were terrible. More than 400,000 Burundians have chosen the way of exile, half of whom still live abroad. Several thousand people have died or gone missing, while thousands more have been arrested. This crisis also hit hard the country’s economy, which today has become the poorest in the world.

At the time, civil society mandated a group of lawyers to file a complaint before the East African Community (EAC) Court of Justice. Dismissed in the first degree in 2016, they had appealed. Seven years later, when Burundi thought it had turned this dark page, these lawyers have just discovered that the Appeals Chamber of the Court of Justice of the EAC had rendered a judgment in their favor, ruling that this third mandate was illegal and violated the Constitution of Burundi.

Simple oversight or deliberate desire to hide a decision that did not please the Burundian authorities? This judgment was rendered by the Community Court of Justice on November 25, 2021 in Bujumbura. But it was not published immediately on its site, nor on its Facebook page, as is the case for all its decisions.

It remained unnoticed until the last few days, when one of the lawyers who had lodged a complaint against the decision of the Constitutional Court of Burundi flushed it out, while researching another subject. Stupor, disbelief, joy… Me Dieudonné Bashirahishize could not believe his eyes when he saw the decision of the Appeals Chamber of the EAC Court of Justice. Black on white, this one said that ” the Constitutional Court of Burundi has violated the Constitution of Burundi, the peace agreement signed in 2000 in Arusha as well as the treaty establishing the Community of East African States “.

But on social media, activists from the CNDD-FDD, the ruling party, mocked a decision that is coming “ too late “, wondering what it was going to serve them. The question also seems to arise on the side of the judges of appeal when they declare that ” the judgment is not easy to implement because the mandate is over, the country has new institutions and the candidate in question is no longer in this world “.

This is not what Me Bashirahishize thinks, who speaks of a ” decision for history “, with many consequences for the very real victims of this third mandate.