The appeal trial of former Gambian interior minister Ousman Sonko against a 20-year jail sentence for crimes against humanity opened Monday in the southeastern Swiss city of Bellinzona.
After being sacked in September 2016 by Gambia's former mercurial strongman Yahya Jammeh, Sonko fled to Switzerland and applied for asylum.
Until his arrest in 2017, he was living in an asylum care centre in the capital Bern.
In May 2024, the 57-year-old Sonko was sentenced to 20 years in prison after the judges in Bellinzona found him guilty of several murders, kidnappings and torture they said constituted crimes against humanity.
"It is important for the judges to realise that there are people directly concerned who are here... for whom this procedure is very important, because they were victims of very serious crimes," Fanny de Weck, the lawyer for two plaintiffs, said at the opening of the appeal trial.
"These are opponents who were arrested and tortured".
The trial, which is expected to last at least two weeks, opened in the presence of five civil parties, who had travelled from The Gambia, an AFP journalist saw.
Gambian journalist Madi Ceesay, a civil party in the trial, told AFP that Sonko was ultimately responsible for his arrest and that he had suffered torture.
"This trial is above all an opportunity to acknowledge and confirm judicially the crimes that were committed, beyond the people present in this courtroom, for all Gambians who were victims of this dictatorship," said Benoit Meystre, legal adviser to Trial International, the NGO behind the proceedings.
Sonko has remained in prison awaiting the appeal trial, with judges refusing his requests for release, citing the risk of flight.
