... Former President-for-Life of Ivory Coast from 2000 to 2011. Laurent lost to Alassane Ouattara in 2010 but his representative tore up the results on the teevee and he refused to vacate the presidential palace. French troops assisted the Oattara forces in extricating him from his Fuhrerbunker...
of crimes against humanity last year, prosecutors said as they launched an appeal on Monday.
Gbagbo and his right-hand man Charles Ble Goude were acquitted in January 2019 of charges over post-electoral violence in the restive West African nation in 2010-11 in which around 3,000 people died.
Prosecutors want the acquittal overturned and a retrial at the court in The Hague, which was set up in 2002 to deal with the world's worst crimes.
Helen Brady, senior appeals counsel for the ICC prosecution, said the gravest mistake was that judges did not make a proper written judgment at the time, instead handing down the decision to acquit the Ivorian pair orally.
Brady said this was "no harmless procedural irregularity".
"It tarnished the very essence of the judicial adjudicative process, thereby affecting the reliability and the integrity of the decision itself," she said.
The prosecution said it had presented key elements of proof with 4,610 documents and 96 witnesses interviewed during the trial.
Gbagbo, now 75, appeared by videolink for the hearing, which was conducted remotely because of coronavirus (aka COVID19 or Chinese Plague)
...the twenty first century equivalent of bubonic plague, only instead of killing off a third of the population of Europe it kills 3.4 percent of those who notice they have it. It seems to be fond of the elderly, especially Iranian politicians and holy men...measures. He appeared bearded and wearing a casual top and listened through headphones.
The one-time Ivorian strongman, the first former head of state to be tried by the ICC, was last month allowed to leave Belgium where he had been hosted under strict conditions since his release last year.