Africa-Press – Liberia. The Ministry of Justice is planning to employ machine translators to tackle the impasse surrounding the US$100 million cocaine trafficking case which has suffered a series of setbacks over the availability of translators.
The Ministry’s proposed move is aimed at addressing the impediment that has been delaying the commencement of the case at Criminal Court ‘C’ as Judge Blamo Dixon placed hold on finalizing the selection of jurors as focus shifts towards securing foreign languages translators for two of the accused.
This comes after Malam Conte and Makki Admeh Issam — the key figure in the case — rejected the translators made available by the Ministry of Justice on grounds that the two guys were not fluent in Arabic and Portuguese respectively.
Conte and Issam had argued that using the government translators would impede their ability to understand the trial as they are innocent.
Conte is a Guinea-Bissau national who is fluent in Arabic while Issam is Portuguese. They, along with two others, are linked to the US$100 million cocaine bust in October 2022, and were subsequently indicted by the Grand Jury of Montserrado County on charges including money laundering, as well as unlicensed possession and importation of controlled drugs, and criminal conspiracy.
However, the trial cannot easily take place in the absence of translators for Conte and Issam. Articles 20 and 21 of the 1986 Constitution provides the “deeply and firmly rooted” rights of translators to alleviate communication barriers in ensuring free and fair trial.
The employment of a machine translator, if accepted by the judge, would immediately kick start the trial, which could last for a year before a verdict is announced.
“The Ministry of Justice is considering hiring a private company to assist with machine translation services and discussions about cost have been taking place and the result so far remains positive,” a ranking official at the Ministry with knowledge of the matter said. “The company is charging US$2,100 per day, but we are in discussion with the management team over price reduction.”
Machine translation is the process of using artificial intelligence to automatically translate text from one language to another without human involvement.
It goes beyond simple word-to-word translation to communicate the full meaning of the original language text in the target language.
However, the accuracy of machine translation compared to human translators could be debated, and any decision about the use of it would be made by the judge in the case.
The decision by the Ministry of Justice to step up the government’s effort to prosecute the defendants comes as pressure mounts for the case to be tried in a timely manner.
But the Ministry’s desire may run in conflict with Article 21 of the Liberian Constitution, which provides for the protection of certain fundamental rights.
The article, among other things, calls for protecting a person’s right to answer and defense, the right to have full disclosure of the case to be answered prior to making one’s defense, and the right to a fair trial.
The case grew from the government’s seizure of US$100 million worth of cocaine in 2022, during which time, a Liberian named Oliver Zayzay, and some of his foreign associates were arrested after seeking to purchase what appeared to be a shipping container full of fresh frozen pig feet from a refrigerated storage facility in Monrovia.
The defendants had initially offered to pay the owners of the container, AJA Group Holdings, the sum of US$200,000 for the entire container which, at the time, cost less than US$30,000.
But when the defendants, within less than eight hours, doubled their offer to US$400,000 and, finally, to US$1 million, AJA Group said they were certain that Zayzay and his associates were dealing with a serious case of narcotics trafficking.
The company said they contacted the United States Ambassador, a move that brought both the American and Liberian anti-narcotics law enforcement agents into the picture and caught the suspects red-handed.
The US$100 million cocaine bust is believed to be the biggest arrest in terms of street value on the African continent so far.
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