Joy is in our hearts! It has taken us 8 years but we have overcome, or rather Laurent Gbagbo and Charles Blé Goudé (How long shall they kill our prophets…?)have overcome. The hour is to joy, and gratitude, because truly perseverance has been their motto for the past few years. All these tough years of claiming their innocence, all these years of constant support and people’s prayers, dedication, love, and determination have born fruits. Yesterday, January 15th 2019, Laurent Gbagbo and Charles Blé Goudé were acquitted of war crimes at the ICC. I rejoice in this step forward. I live you with snippets of the article from the NPR below. In latest news, the prosecution is trying to bar Gbagbo and Blé Goudé from returning to their home country of Côte d’Ivoire, and instead wants to keep them roaming through in Europe: this is another case of Deportation of African Heads of States. We will keep fighting to the last drop! As Agostinho Neto said: “La luta continua e la victoria e certa!”

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A panel of judges at the International Criminal Court has dismissed charges of war crimes against former Ivory Coast President Laurent Gbagbo, the first former head of state to stand trial at the ICC. Charges against his former youth minister, Charles Blé Goudé, also were dropped.

[…] A majority of the three-judge panel concluded that prosecutors had failed to show that there was a “common plan” to keep Gbagbo in power, nor “the existence of patterns of violence from which it could be inferred that there was a ‘policy to attack a civilian population,’ ” the court said in a press release.

Public speeches by Gbagbo and Blé Goudé did not constitute ordering, soliciting or inducing the alleged crimes, the judges said – adding that they needed no further evidence from the defense.

[…] After refusing to hand over power, Gbagbo was pulled from an underground bunker at the presidential residence in Abidjan in April 2011, and then whisked to The Hague in November 2011. He was held in custody for more than seven years.