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For more than 12 years, Malik Medjnoune, currently 38 years old, has been kept in provisional detention awaiting his trial.
Taken on 28 September 1999 at Tizi-Ouzou by agents of the Algerian Departement of Intelligence and Security (DRS), he was tortured and interrogated at the DRS's "Antar" centre in Ben-Aknoun (Algiers).
In a letter to Rachid Mesli, his lawyer at the time and Alkarama's legal director, he testifies that: "Everything happened there: blows with a hoe-handle on every part of the body... Then they started torturing me with electricity."
He was first brought before the General Attorney of Tizi-Ouzou in March 2000, at the same time as Hakim Chenoui, a repentant member of the local armed groups. The magistrate refused to call for the opening of a judicial inquiry and to bring him before the examining magistrate because of the weakness of the case. Even more seriously, the Prosecutor General asked the DRS agents to "take him back", which in the context of that period would be equivalent to disappearing him for good.
Not until two months later, when his case was brought to the attention of the Working Group on Enforced Disappearances and when Amnesty International, on a visit to Algeria, tried to contact his family, was he finally brought before the examining magistrate. That was when they told him that he was accused of assassinating the famous Kabyle singer Lounès Matoub. He was completely stupefied: "I even thought he was joking and that he just wanted to test me and scare me before freeing me." By then it was May 2000, and Malik Medjnoune had been secretly detained without any contact with the outside world for eight months already.
In 2002, looking for evidence to prop up the official account of this assassination, the DRS arrested a young man, Ahmed Cherbi, summoned to testify against Malik Medjnoune even though he did not know him. In a letter sent to lawyer Rachid Mesli, he explained: "I said that I could not denounce people I didn't know at all, I could not bear false witness." This earned him 43 days of torture, and, under the effect of drugs, he finally accused Malik Medjnoune, then retracted his accusation.
Condemned by the UN, Algeria resorts to the pretext of "a political sensitive issue"
Between 2004 and 2011, more than fifteen letters have been sent to the Human Rights Committee and the UN Special Rapporteur against Torture by the organisation Alkarama ("Dignity".) It concerns itself with violations of human rights in the Arab world, and keeps trying to resolve the situation of Malik Medjnoune.
The power to open the trial of Malik Medjnoune lies with the Prosecutor General of the court of Tizi-Ouzou. Yet he has delayed this decision for twelve years already. On a visit he made to him in prison, to order him to stop one of his many hunger strikes, the Prosecutor admitted to Malik Medjnoune that he did not have the power to bring him before the court because the Matoub affair is "politically sensitive".
It is true that the day after the assassination of the singer on 25 June 1998, Tizi-Ouzou was out in force and the Algerian authorities, were openly accused by the demonstrators. A "genuine false" communiqué claiming the assassination and attributed to the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (GSPC) was immediately denied and the violent argument continued for many days.
It was therefore necessary to close the file that was causing so much trouble in a region with a rebellious reputation, and Malik Medjnoune, who for eight long months had been kept in the dungeons of the "Antar" barracks, was the perfect person to accuse.
The trial, initially fixed for 5 May 2001, was postponed sine die. At that date, in fact, all Kabylie was rising up after the assassination of a young man in a gendarmerie squad office. The Algerian authorities knew that their version of events would convince no one, and therefore refrained in fear that the announced trial would end up strengthening the idea, deeply rooted in the population, that they were directly implicated in the singer's assassination.
They acknowledged their refusal to try Malik Medjnoune before the United Nations Committee itself, unhesitatingly justifying themselves by saying that "the incidents which the region has experienced do not allow this affair to be judged justly in the calm atmosphere required for such a proceeding."
A denial of justice openly asserted by the highest authorities of the country and endorsed by court orders – and with no other reaction to such a judicial scandal, in particular by the National Bar Association, whose role today raises many questions.
The detention of Malik Medjnoune without trial for almost 12 years constitutes, under Algerian law, a crime subject to penal sanctions. The General Attorney of Tizi-Ouzou, after having made himself complicit in enforced disappearance when he sent Malik Medjnoune back into secret detention, has now made himself guilty of arbitrary detention.
Alkarama therefore did not hesitate, in a letter of 9 May 2011, to remind the Prosecutor General that, under Algeria's Penal Code, officials who refuse or neglect to fail to respond to a complaint seeking to certify an illegal and arbitrary detention, and who do not have the excuse of having reported it to a superior authority, are punished by imprisonment for a term of five to ten years.