Court Watch
in Columbia were grossly inadequate in terms of their thoroughness and timeliness, thus precluding Columbia from claiming a lack of jurisdiction based on the requirement for first exhausting domestic remedies.
On July 25, 2011, the Commission sent the case to the IACHR after concluding that Columbia had failed to comply with the recommendations laid out in its report. But with no trial date yet set, the Afro-descendants of the Cacarica River Basin will have to continue their wait for justice.
*Submitted by James Foster
International Criminal Court Tries First Case Against Thomas Lubanga Dyilo
The situation case of Prosecutor vs. Thomas Lubanga Dyilo (Case No. ICC-01/04-01/06) con- cerns actions that took place during the Democrat- ic Republic of Congo’s civil war between 2002 and 2003. Lubanga is the alleged founder and president of the Union des Patriotes Congolais (UPC), a rebel group that aimed at transforming the region of Ituri, located in the northeastern region of Congo, into an autonomous province. Lubanga is the first per- son to be tried by the International Criminal Court in its nine years of existence.
Congo’s civil war dates back to the summer of 1999, when tensions emerged as a result of dis- putes over the allocation of land in Ituri and the ap- propriation of natural resources. In 2002, violence reemerged in various parts of the district.
During the war, the UPC acted mainly through its military branch, the Forces Patriotiques pour la Lib- eration du Congo (FPLC). Lubanga is charged, as co-perpetrator, with the war crimes of enlistment and conscription of children under the age of 15 years old into the FPLC and UPC and using them to participate actively in acts of warfare.
Lubanga was arrested and surrendered to the ICC on March 16, 2006. His trial started on January 26,
2009, prior to the Confirmation of charges hear- ings. The proceedings were stayed twice, due to allegations of lack if procedural fairness by the part of the prosecutor, who denied to disclose poten- tially exculpatory evidence.
In the closing oral statements, the prosecutor used evidence of particular importance: a video in which Lubanga is in a UPC/FPLC training camp in Rwampara. Deputy Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda af- firmed that this evidence proved, “not just beyond reasonable doubt but beyond any possible doubt,” that Lubanga is guilty of the war crimes charged against him by means of having systematically re- cruited children under the age of 15 as soldiers in his political movement (the UPC/FPLC) and used them in hostilities. In addition, Bensouda maintained that the conscription and recruitment were part of a de- liberate and clearly conceived plan which indicated the presence of the element of intent, required for the crimes of Article 8 of the Rome Statute, under which Lubanga is accused.
During the proceedings, the Prosecution was criti- cized by several women’s rights non-governmental organizations (such as the Women’s Initiatives for Gender Justice) because Lubanga was not addi- tionally charged with the crime of rape. Prosecu- tor Ocampo explained that “the girls were abused, used as sexual slaves and raped. We believe this suffering is part of the suffering of the conscrip- tion.”
During the Lubanga procedures over one hundred victims participated. Paolina Massidda, Principal Counsel of the Office of Public Counsel for Vic- tims, emphasized that the victims were not the assistants, but the allies of the Prosecution, with independent self-expression. In this sense, the vic- tims had taken a number of initiatives which went beyond the Prosecution’s requests, including trying to modify the legal characterization of facts in the case and requesting the Chamber to find him guilty as a direct perpetrator in addition to the co-perpe- trator liability initially proposed by the Prosecution. Legal Representative of Victims Carine Bapita
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