From Uganda to The Hague and Back: The ICC’s Ongwen Case

Abstract

On a cold February morning in 2021 in Trial Chamber IX in the Hague, Dominic Ongwen rose to hear the judgment for his crimes committed far away in the savanna grassland of northern Uganda almost 20 years ago, when he was a brigade commander of the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) rebel group. The orderly proceedings of the Hague courtroom stood in stark contrast to the four attacks, crimes against child soldiers and gender-based crimes of which the Chamber found him guilty: attacks in which his soldiers surrounded camps sheltering civilians displaced by the war and indiscriminately shot them, burning more inside their tents and grass huts. Such LRA violence did not start with these crimes, nor did it stop after them. Ongwen had felt the effects of such violence himself, being taken on his way home from school and forced to commit atrocities as a child against other abductees. The judgment delivered that cold February morning and its confirmation on appeal the following winter brought to an end years of trial proceedings, but did it represent justice more broadly?