Eduardo González
Germany has just closed its Embassy in Malabo and the regime is still dragging its feet with the representative proposed by the European External Action Service (EEAS). At the moment only three EU states, Spain, France and Portugal, have embassies in Equatorial Guinea, but even in these cases diplomatic relations are still pending legal cases and complaints of human rights violations coming from these countries.
In the case of the EU, relations began to deteriorate in 2008, when the regime of Teodoro Obiang Nguema formulated a reservation against Article 11 of the Cotonou Agreement, which refers to the International Criminal Court and requires States to ratify the Rome Statute governing this court. Because of this reservation, Malabo’s ratification of the 2000 Cotonou Agreement (signed by Equatorial Guinea in 2005 and defining trade and cooperation relations between the EU and 78 African, Caribbean and Pacific States) was rendered ineffective and Equatorial Guinea could not benefit from the tenth and eleventh European Development Funds.
For the same reason, the EU did not send any delegation to Malabo. Recently, the EEAS asked the Equatoguinean government to grant accreditation to the current European representative in Cameroon, Philippe Van Damme, but the regime continues to drag its feet and the decision is stuck in the hands of the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Simeon Oyono Esono Angue, as reported on July 21 by the prestigious pan-African digital newspaper Africa Intelligence. In the meantime, the EU is represented by its delegation in Gabon and the representation of the Union in Equatorial Guinea corresponds to the Embassies of its Member States.
At present, only three European countries have an Embassy in Malabo: Spain, France and Portugal (with a diplomatic mission since 2015 and ambassador since September 2020, in the person of Frederico Silva). The presence of only three European countries should not attract attention, taking into account the size of the country and the possibility of exercising representation from neighboring countries (Malabo has only about thirty Embassies, from 16 African countries and countries from other continents, such as the United States, China, North Korea, India, Cuba, Venezuela, Brazil or Turkey). The problem is that Germany, which did have an embassy, closed its representation on July 15, after ten years in operation, as part of a process of reorganization of German diplomatic representations in Africa.
France and Portugal
The other problem is that the presence of the three European embassies does not guarantee stable diplomatic relations, and some of them are even in serious danger of disappearing. This is the case of France, whose relations with Equatorial Guinea have deteriorated in recent years due to the proceedings opened by the French justice system against the Vice-President of the Government, Teodoro Nguema Obiang (popularly known as Teodorin and son of President Teodoro Obiang Nguema), for the so-called case of “ill-gotten goods”. Teodorin was sentenced in 2020 by the Paris Court of Appeal to a three-year jail term for embezzlement of public funds.
The sentence is suspended, but Equatorial Guinea’s ambassador to France, Miguel Oyono Ndong Mifumu (former minister and former spokesman for Obiang to the Spanish press), has threatened to break diplomatic relations and close the Embassy. Ambassador Olivier Brochenin was summoned last April by the Presidency of Equatorial Guinea after the French Prosecutor’s Office rejected an appeal by Teodorin’s defense. In any case, this situation did not prevent that, at the beginning of June, President Obiang himself and the French Embassy signed an agreement to increase bilateral military cooperation in the fight against terrorism and piracy in the Gulf of Guinea.
Things are not much better with Portugal, whose Prime Minister, António Costa, has demanded that Equatorial Guinea respect human rights (with special attention to the death penalty) if it wants to remain part of the Community of Portuguese Language Countries (CPLP). “We are a community based on the values of freedom, democracy, respect for human rights and the dignity of the person, which is absolutely incompatible with the existence of the death penalty in any of the member countries”, he declared in mid-July in Lisbon on the occasion of the CPLP summit.
Spain
Regarding the former colonial metropolis, relations deteriorated considerably from 2019, when the then ambassador of Spain, Guillermo López Mac-Lellan, received at Malabo International Airport the secretary general of the opposition formation Convergence for Social Democracy (CPDS), Andrés Esono Ondo, who had been arrested and subsequently released in Chad, on charges of acquiring “arms, ammunition and terrorists to commit a coup in the Republic of Equatorial Guinea with foreign financing”. The Spanish government expressed its “concern” over the arrest of Esono Ondo and the Malabo regime called this statement an “unacceptable interference”.
In February 2020, the ambassador experienced another tense moment after becoming personally involved with his colleagues from France and the United States in an operation to prevent the arrest, apparently irregular, of former Supreme Court President Juan Carlos Ondo Angue (son of the former Equatorial Guinea ambassador to Spain, Purificacion Angue Ondo), whom the regime is investigating in connection with an alleged coup attempt in December 2017. The day after the events, Simeon Oyono Esono Angue denounced the “interference” of the three ambassadors “in the internal affairs of Equatorial Guinea”.
These diplomatic incidents are joined by the legal cases opened in Spain (with arrest warrants included) against Cándido Nsue Okomo, resident in Dubai and brother of the first lady, Constancia Mangue Nsue Obiang, in relation to an alleged payment of 5.3 million euros to former Spanish police commissioner José Manuel Villarejo in 2013 in exchange for compromising information about Gabriel Obiang Lima, Minister of Petroleum and another son of the president (and a loyal ally of the American oil majors).
Despite the fact that Nsue Okomo is an avowed political enemy of Teodorin (who has withdrawn his diplomatic immunity), the Foreign Minister (at the behest of the First Lady) met in December 2020 with Alfonso Barnuevo, Spanish ambassador since November 2020, to try to stop the extradition order requested by the Spanish Justice against Constancia Mangue’s brother. Finally, the Spanish Ministry of Justice annulled the arrest warrant against Candido Nsue Okomo last January 5 and asked Interpol (to which the international arrest warrant, executed by the Dubai Police on December 19, had been requested) to release him.
