23/09/2025
Opening Statement in Defence of Dr. Riek Machar Teny Dhurgon
22nd September 2025 – Juba
If it were to be written and delivered by Prof. Dr. PLO Lumumba
My Lords, this convocation, ostentatiously denominated the trial of Dr. Riek Machar Teny Dhurgon, is in veritate not a iudicium legitimum but a spectaculum politicum — a juridico-political phantasmagoria in which lex is transmogrified into licentia, ius debauched into iniuria, and constitutionalism prostituted upon the altar of expediency.
The prosecutorial apparatchiks, intoxicated by potestas absolutus and suffused with servitus sycophantica, disgorge indictments that are nullitates ab initio — juridical abortions conceived in odium politicum, gestated in mediocrity, and predestined for sepulture in the necropolis nullitatum. Their pleadings are tautological tautophonies: philological facades, lexically baroque yet substantively vacuous, jurisdictionally anaemic, hermeneutically incoherent.
Meanwhile, the respondent, Dr. Machar, languishes in carcer perpetuus, victim of a doctrinal inversion whereby praesumptio innocentiae has been execrably transubstantiated into praesumptio culpae. This inversion is not error procedendi but apostasia constitutionalis, a peccatum mortale against the very soul of jurisprudence — an abominationes desolationis that would cause the ossified bones of Ulpian, Papinian, Blackstone, Coke, and Justinian to rattle indignantly in their sarcophagi.
Cicero, in the Catilinarian Orations, thundered: “Quo usque tandem abutere, patientia nostra?” — How long shall patience be prostituted by political adventurism? Aristotle, in the Ethica Nicomachea, elevated justice as virtus maxima, the telos of civic existence. Augustine of Hippo, in De Civitate Dei, admonished that a state without justice is but a magnum latrocinium. Aquinas, in the Summa Theologica, affirmed that lex injusta non est lex sed violentia quaedam — an unjust law is not law but a species of violence.
Thus, My Lords, the issue t
