Benin opposition leader Reckya Madougou was sentenced on Saturday to 20 years in prison for terrorism by a special court in the capital Porto-Novo after a brief trial that her lawyers condemned as a “political attack”.
After more than 20 hours of hearings, Madougou was found guilty of “complicity in terrorist acts” by the Economic Crime and Terrorism Court, or Criet, which on Tuesday sentenced another key opposition figure to 10 years.
Critics say the court, set up in 2016, has been used by President Patrice Talon’s regime to crack down on the opposition and push Benin into authoritarianism.
Madougou said shortly before her prison sentence was announced. “This court has deliberately decided to penalise an innocent person, I have never been and I will never be a terrorist,”
“It’s a sad day for our justice system, I maintain that there is no proof,” one of her lawyers, Robert Dossou, told AFP.
Madougou was one of several Benin opposition leaders banned from running in an election in April in which Talon won a second term with 86 per cent of the vote.
She was arrested in the economic capital Cotonou in March — just weeks before the election — accused of financing an operation to assassinate political figures to prevent the vote, in an alleged bid to “destabilise” the country.
“Tried at 6 am, without witnesses, without documents, without evidence, Recky Madougou was sentenced to 20 years in prison by three accomplices of those in power,” her France-based lawyer Antoine Vey tweeted after the sentencing.
“Her crime: to have embodied a democratic alternative to the regime of Patrice Talon.”
Vey had told the trial on Friday that “this procedure is nothing but a political attack”.
“Even before her arrest, everything was orchestrated,” Vey said a day after arriving from Paris.
He asked for the trial to be cancelled, before leaving the court and never returning — Madougou’s Benin-based lawyers stayed for the remainder.
Vey then told AFP that it was “a trial in which nothing was judicial”.
Madougou said on the stand at the trial that she had “no illusions” about its outcome.
“I offer myself to the democracy of my country if my sacrifice can give your court back its independence,” she said.