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Congo-Brazzaville: Court registrar steals ivory; gets one-year jail term.
Congo-Brazzaville: Court registrar steals ivory; gets one-year jail term.
A court registrar has been found guilty of stealing 6 ivory tusks and sentenced to one year in prison by a high court in the Congo Republic. The ivory tusks that were in the keeping of the court had been obtained following the completion of a case against three ivory traffickers who were arrested in 2017 with the six ivory tusks.
It is reported that the court registrar, Boyanga Godefroy, took advantage of his positon to trick court personnel to steal the ivory. The ruling was passed on October 24, just a few days to the passing of a ruling at the Bonanjo Court of First Instance in Douala on a similar affair and the sentence was widely different. The Bonanjo court gave a 6-month suspended sentence for people who were found with thousands of wildlife products.
The three were arrested in 2017 by the mobile unit of the police in Douala. Adamu Ibrahim, Upah Macmillan and Akenji Ebenezer where found with 158 ivory tusks, 26 bags of pangolin scales, 124 heads of African grey parrots and 1394 parrot feathers; totally prohibited products. The wildlife ministry brought a matter against them and the judge on October 30 gave the convicted traffickers a 6-month suspended sentence for 3 years and to blight matters, all three were free while on trial. An international NGO called LAGA assisted wildlife officials in the legal follow up of the case in Douala.
The ruling by the Bonanjo court contrasts sharply with that given by the Congolese court that did not only heavily sanction those who were initially arrested with six ivory tusks but equally sentenced the registrar who stole the ivory. Two of the three traffickers in Congo were given 3 years imprisonment and ordered to pay fines and damages of 3million CFA francs.
The legal follow-up of the cases in Congo was technically supported PALF, a Congolese project; member of the EAGLE network that groups organisations working in wildlife law enforcement on the continent. These projects are replicated from the model developed in the Cameroon by LAGA and the Ministry of Forestry and Wildlife.