SUDAN INSIGHT ALERT: Reuters - Sudan task force chasing Bashir-era assets sees progress, faces criticism

6/4/2021: Reuters - Sudan task force chasing Bashir-era assets sees progress, faces criticism, by Khalid Abdelaziz and Nafisa Eltahir

Reuters’ feature piece reports on criticism that the Sudan’s Empowerment Removal Committee, “the group set up to claw back assets from ousted President Omar al-Bashir and his associates” and “aims to purge public bodies of al-Bashir loyalists,” applies “selective justice”.

Reuters cite a protest triggered by the sacking of 7,000 from the civil service “without proper explanation or appeal process.” Some critics see the committee as a means for easy political point scoring by a government struggling to manage an economic crisis, while others are concerned about what they see as a shaky legal framework, add Reuters.

Warning of a lack of due process, Mohamed Abdelsalam, dean of the University of Khartoum law school, said “a better approach would be to establish a group of independent commissioners, rather than politicians, able to apply the law equally to every individual..[as] the current practice can be labelled as selective justice.”