Senegalese justice on Tuesday (February 21) upheld the referral of the main opponent Ousmane Sonko to court for alleged "rape and death threats" by declaring "inadmissible" a request from his defense to quash this decision, his lawyer told AFP. AFP.
Mr. Sonko was charged and placed under judicial supervision in March 2021 for "rape and death threats" after a complaint by an employee of a beauty salon in Dakar where he was going to have a massage. An investigating judge decided on January 18 to refer the opponent to a criminal chamber.
Mr. Sonko's defense had challenged this referral and on February 14 asked the indictment chamber of the Dakar Court of Appeal to seize the Constitutional Council. "The appeal is declared inadmissible" by the indictment chamber of the court of appeal, Ciré Clédor Ly, a lawyer for Mr. Sonko, told AFP on Tuesday.
"A strictly political matter"
The arrest of the opponent in this case in March 2021 had helped to trigger riots which had left a dozen dead. Mr. Sonko has repeatedly reiterated that his referral to a criminal chamber will not prevent him from being a presidential candidate in 2024.
He had, the day after this dismissal, denounced a "real false legal case, a strictly political affair, instrumentalized by the power of Macky Sall for the exclusive purpose of dismissing a candidate who, by far, seems to be one of the best placed to win the next presidential election.
Mr Sonko is, in a separate case, being sued by Tourism Minister Mame Mbaye Niang, a presidential party official, for "defamation, insults and forgery". The trial, scheduled for March 16, could be decisive for his candidacy in 2024, the texts providing for removal from the electoral lists, and therefore ineligibility, in certain cases of conviction.
President Macky Sall, elected in 2012 for seven years and re-elected in 2019 for five years, remains unclear about his intention to run for a new term in 2024.
