European Parliamentarians vote during one of this week’s sessions JULIEN WARNAD (EFE)
Two decades later, the European Parliament has again ruled on Teodoro Obiang’s “dictatorial regime” in Equatorial Guinea. 518 of the 546 participants in this Thursday’s plenary session voted in favor of a resolution deploring the “systematic and organized strategy of political persecution and repression of political opponents at home and abroad by the dictatorial regime of Obiang” which includes arbitrary arrests, harassment, kidnappings, forced transfers , torture, murder and death sentences. The European Parliament is also demanding the repatriation of Julio Obama, a Spanish national opponent of the dictatorship who died in prison last January, and the release of three other opponents who are being held in an unfair trial “according to Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch”. Imprisonment was sentenced from 60 to 90 years.
Julio Obama, Feliciano Efa, Martín Obiang and Bienvenido Ndong disappeared in South Sudan in 2019. According to the complaint lodged by their relatives with the Spanish police “Obama and Efa are Spanish nationals and the other two are residents of Madrid”, the four opponents of the Obiang dictatorship were tricked into going to Juba (South Sudan), where they were kidnapped and transferred to Equatorial Guinea. In this country they were tortured, tried without guarantees and sentenced to long prison terms. One of them, Julio Obama, 61, died in January. All this has prompted the National Court to launch an investigation involving the dictator’s son, Carmelo Ovono Obiang, as reported by EL PAÍS; Secretary of State Nicolas Obama; and the director general of presidential security, Isaac Mgmea.
The case has reached the European Parliament, which has adopted an emergency resolution led by several Spanish MPs. One of them was the representative of Ciudadanos, Jordi Cañas, editor and negotiator of the final approved text, who in his speech denounced that the regime “has been violating human rights since 1979”, and consequently showed his surprise that they had to go through 20 years for the European Parliament to be able to speak again.
Domènec Ruiz Devesa, the Socialist MEP who took the floor after 10pm on Wednesday in the debate, began his speech by emphasizing that Obama is a “European citizen” as he has both Guinean and Spanish citizenship. “No one deserves to die for their ideas. We demand that this harassment and arbitrary arrests stop inside and outside the country,” he continued.
One of the harshest interventions was that of Anticapitalistas’ Miguel Urban. The deputy spoke of a “systematic plan of repression”. He also points out that there has not been a harsher response to the dictatorship due to the interests of Spanish companies in the country. Urban also requested “the confiscation of the family’s assets [del dictador] in Europe, starting with Spain”.
Another very tough Spaniard was Vox MP Herman Tertsch, who began his speech with a speech about “the world’s oldest dictator”. Tertsch also demanded to know what happened so that the Spanish judge investigating the case, Santiago Pedraz, “lift the summary secrecy” and allow the investigators to escape. He referred to the resignation of the judge arresting the dictator’s son on December 29, when Carmelo Ovono Obiang was in Madrid, and instead called on the police to inform the Guinean leader that he was under investigation and a lawyer to designate and a lawyer in the open case. Hours later, the dictator’s son fled.
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Gabriel Mato intervened in Parliament for the PP, who demanded that “the European Union and the Member States must remember once and for all that in international relations, values should prevail, not interests”.
The resolution passed calls for the release of political prisoners in the former Spanish colony – Portuguese Socialist MP Isabel Santos counted more than 500 – and “respect for international legislation on human rights, decent prison conditions, fair trials and access to families and loved ones”. For their part, the EU and its member states must suspend all forms of military, police and security cooperation with Equatorial Guinea and sanction members of the regime who have committed human rights abuses.