ABSTRACT
The rule of international law, which under certain circumstances heads of state is immunized from liability, cannot, the Nuremberg Tribunal held, be applied to acts which are condemned as criminal by international law. As Raphael Lemkin pointed out in his 1945 article, the crime of the Nazis in wantonly and deliberately wiping out whole peoples was not utterly new in the world. A second feature of the modern version of indigenous spoliation is the amount of wealth involved, usually billions of dollars. President Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo has chosen to use with impunity the patrimony of the Equatoguinean people to enrich himself and his family while denying them the basic fruits of development in the process. The frequency of military coups and other extra-constitutional methods of regime change lend further support for the view that persistent and unrestrained corruption by high-ranking officials invariably lead to serious social instability.
