The Perspective
Atlanta, Georgia
March 20, 2019

Associate Justice Kabineh M. Ja’neh

The two-top legal voices of Liberia had a chance to square off days ago about the impeachment saga of Associate Justice Kabineh Ja’neh. Speaking one after another, the Chief Justice of Liberia and Cllr. Tiawan Gongloe, President of the Liberia National Bar Association (LNBA) both gave their take on the issue. They stood at the extreme ends of the issues.

The Chief Justice said he was just doing “his job” according to the constitution. Then he said, according to the Liberian Observer, that he is being “crucified” for doing so. Hardly the case like this, since he is speaking from the comfortable position of Supreme Judge. At the trial of Jesus, there was never any doubt about who was being “crucified.”  The Chief Justice was responding to calls from many corners that the trial he was about to preside over was nothing but a sham, a political witch hunt. In a distorted way, one can agreed with him: he is being crucified by those who put him in that position, forcing him to sacrifice one of his colleagues for political expediencies, endangering Liberia’s fragile political process.

If anything, Cllr. Gongloe put in layman term the whole saga. According to the President of the LNBA, the trial is based on false premises which cannot be justified through the cannons of Liberia jurisprudence.  The bogus charges brought against Cllr Ja’neh by two members of the House of Representatives were based on 3 cases: in the first two cases, Associate Justice Ja’neh rendered judgment on behalf of the Supreme Court and the other case was brought in front of the full bench.

The Chief Justice, as we understand now, signed on these cases. This bring another issue: how did the Supreme Court endorse the judgment of Cllr Ja’neh on all three cases and now turns around to impeach him on same cases? Did the Chief Justice learn new facts or he is just not up to the task?  Indeed, if he is being forced to preside over this trial for whatever reason, he can rightly say he is being crucified, but not his critics.