Hissene Habre hearing set for Tuesday

A French doctor who treated hundreds of Chadian torture victims, the president of Chad’s truth commission and former Chadian detainees will testify before a Senegalese court next week in the case against former Chadian dictator, Hissein Habre, human rights organisations said on Friday. On Thursday, the Dakar Indicting Chamber announced that a motion to dismiss the case, presented by Habre’s lawyers, would be heard on Tuesday. A specialist in the rehabilitation of torture victims, Hélène Jaffé, will tell the Dakar Regional Court of a survey she did of 581 patients who had been tortured by Habre’s regime, which lasted from 1982 to 1990, according to a news released issued by Human Rights Watch (HRW). Another witness, Mahamat Hassan Abakar, president of Chad’s truth commission, accused Habre’s government, in a 1992 report, of 40,000 political murders and systematic torture and brutality, mostly by the Direction de la Documentation et de la Sécurité (DDS), a secret police force. Habre - who has lived in exile in Senegal since being overthrown in 1990 - was placed under house arrest in February after being indicted on torture charges, the first former African head of state to have been indicted for atrocities in another country. On 18 February, his lawyers filed a motion to dismiss the case arguing that Senegal had no jurisdiction over crimes committed in Chad.