This morning, TwitterNG was awash with news about the death of Itunu Babalola who died in an Ivoirian prison after being wrongfully convicted of human trafficking. These stories are important, not because they tell stories of governmental bravado, but for their need in stark contrast to how much we have failed our people over here, in Nigeria. The incarceration led to an outcry from major names in the music and political scene alike and was briefly co-opted by President Donald Trump, who tried to sway Swedish prime minister Stefan Löfven to let Rocky out on bail. Rocky had been in custody since early July of that year for allegedly assaulting a 19-year-old Stockholm man, Mustafa Jafari, on June 30, 2019.
#MUSTAFA JAFARI FREE#
A Swedish court ruled that Rocky-real name Rakim Mayers-and two other suspects in an assault charge were free from detention and welcome to leave the country, pending a verdict set to be announced on August 14, 2019. Two years ago, after nearly a month in a Swedish jail, American rapper A$AP Rocky was released. There’s no gainsaying the fact that he was arrested and jailed to be used as a pawn in hostage diplomacy between Myanmar and the United States, as the US had hitherto placed sanctions on the former over its February 1, 2021, coup. On Friday, November 12, he had been sentenced to no less than 10 years in prison by Myanmar’s military government for crimes it listed as “casting the image of the military in a bad light”. This morning, November 15, 2021, it was reported that Danny Fenster, an American journalist and chief editor of Frontier Myanmar, an independent news outlet based in Myanmar has been released. If he is convicted and sent to prison, a diplomatic official is sure to take on the role of visiting him in prison, on a regular basis, until he is set free. When a British (or insert serious country here) passport holder is detained in another country, it matters what not he has done, the diplomats of his home country are duty-bound to defend his interests. In sending the Royal Navy to punish the Greeks, Palmerston quoted Cicero’s “Civis Romanus sum”, and paraphrased it with “An injury to one is an injury to all,” setting the tone for the passport system in use in international relations till this day. The blockade lasted two months, and in the end, a humiliated Greece agreed to compensate Pacifico to the tune of £500, a prince’s ransom in those days. Two years passed, and there was still no compensation for Pacifico, so Palmerston instructed the Royal Navy to blockade the port of Athens.
The sum demanded was more than the value of the Greek Royal Palace, and the Greeks replied that this was a judicial affair, and that separation of powers would not permit them to intervene. That fact, swung the British into action, and it no longer mattered if Pacifico had offended local Greek customs leading to the attack, what mattered was that he was British, and Lord Palmerston, the British foreign secretary at the time, sent a demand to the Greeks asking compensation for Pacifico. He wrote to Edmund Lyons, the British envoy to Greece, and crucially in his letter, inserted the claim, with evidence, that he was a British citizen. The police did nothing and instead arrested the victim. In 1847, a Jewish man, David Pacifico, was attacked by an anti-Semitic mob in Athens, Greece.
#MUSTAFA JAFARI TRIAL#
He would eventually stand trial before Emperor Nero.Ī few millennia later, Rome was no longer in charge of the earth, it was an island, Great Britain, that now ruled the waves.
Paul had a right to get his case heard by no less a person than the Emperor. While the garrison commander had purchased his citizenship, Paul, was a birthright citizen of Rome, and as a result, if that crowd had killed him that day, the Roman garrison in Jerusalem would have been obliged to kill a few of them in return. Unlike Jesus Christ himself two decades earlier, Paul was able to speak in Greek to the commander of the garrison and introduce himself as a Jew born in Tarsus, but crucially, end his statement with the words, “Civis Romanus sum”.
However, the Roman garrison intervened to stop the burgeoning riot. Having arrived in Jerusalem to settle a little brouhaha with the senior apostle James, who was effectively the head of the fledgeling Christian church in Jerusalem, Paul was mobbed by a crowd for preaching. Permit me to tell five stories, four happy, and one depressing.Ĭicero’s idea was played upon by the Christian apostle, Paul, a century after Cicero died.
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