The International Criminal Court (ICC) said today it would pursue a war crimes trial of Congolese opposition figure Jean-Pierre Bemba, rejecting a defence appeal seeking to dismiss the case.
The ruling removed the final obstacle to the long delayed trial of Bemba, who has denied all charges against him, but a start date has not yet been set, a court official said.
Lawyers for Bemba, the highest-profile suspect so far brought before the Hague-based court, had argued he had already been investigated in the Central African Republic and could not be prosecuted twice for the same crime.
But presiding judge Anita Usacka said the appeals chamber rebuffed all four legal arguments in the appeal, ruling they had had failed to meet the "minimum requirement".
"For the reasons I have summarised, the appeals chamber (has) . . . dismissed the appeal," Ms Usacka told the court.
In June, the trial court threw out a defence challenge asserting that there had been an abuse of due process, but Bemba's lawyers appealed against that ruling.
Bemba, a former vice president of the Democratic Republic of Congo, was arrested in Belgium in 2008 and transferred to the ICC in The Hague in the Netherlands.
The 47-year-old has denied all five charges of crimes against humanity and war crimes against him, including murder, rape and pillaging in the Central African Republic in 2002-03.
The trial was due to have begun on April 27th, but the ICC said a status hearing should be held first to discuss Bemba's legal challenge to what will be the ICC's third trial.
Bemba was defeated by President Joseph Kabila in a 2006 election and became Congo's most prominent opposition figure.
He fled into exile in 2007, saying he feared for his life.
Reuters