Operation Spring

In May 1999, Nigerian Marcus Omofuma died while being deported from Austria to Nigeria. He had been gagged and bound by the police during the journey. Amidst a wave of protests organised by Nigerians living in Austria, public furor erupted and the police were widely condemned by politicians, the public and the media. Later that month, in the biggest raid of its kind in Austrian history, police arrested more than 100 Nigerians, apparently in an effort to break up a 'huge drug ring'. The men, many of whom had organised protests to highlight the Omofuma case, were eventually sentenced to a total of several hundred years imprisonment, allegedly for drug–related offences. Operation Spring employed new methods of investigation, including video and audio surveillance and the subsequent trials made use of new legislation. Through a series of revealing interviews, this stark and provocative documentary exposes a series of abuses of police powers and a clear miscarriage of justice – the charges brought were unsubstantiated and based on insufficient evidence, erroneous translations, misconstrued statements and the use of anonymous witnesses. Before I became involved in the Operation Spring trials, I had never had a trial where the sentence read: unknown amount sold to unknown persons at unknown places at an unknown time, says the defence lawyer for Emmanuel Chukwujekwu, one of the men targeted in the operation, thus posing the question: Did the (black) defendants ever stand a chance of receiving a fair trial?

The partner of the screening is International Documentary Film Festival Jihlava.