Bosco Ntaganda, whom the United States calls “one of the most notorious and brutal rebels in the Democratic Republic of the Congo,” has arrived at the International Criminal Court in The Hague after being transported by court officials from Rwanda. Ntaganda is a Congolese warlord who has been operating with impunity in eastern Congo on [...]
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Gert Rosenthal does not sound like a Spanish name, but the mother of Rosenthal, the Guatemalan ambassador to the United Nations, was born there and his father was German. To complicate matters, “a little accident happened,” he said, as his parents, Florence and Ludwig, left Germany in the 1930s, and Rosenthal was born in Amsterdam. [...]
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The president of the International Criminal Court, Judge Sang-Hyun Song, told a Columbia University audience recently that a major challenge facing the court is what he called a steady lack of political support from the United Nations Security Council and UN member states. “We need a far more consistent and vigilant approach by the [...]
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One of Fatou Bensouda‘s missions as the new chief prosecutor for the International Criminal Court is to make rape during conflicts a thing of the past. Until 20 years ago, she said in a speech at the United Nations recently, sexual violence and other sexual attacks were “all but ignored and dismissed as regrettable but [...]
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Less than two decades ago, this is what happened to a huge African country once known as Zaire: Rebels backed by Rwanda’s recently installed, ethnic Tutsi-led government moved out of their strongholds in the eastern flank of the country and advanced toward the Zairian national capital, Kinshasa, and overthrew the central government. To Rwandan Tutsi, [...]
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Important progress in controlling the mining of tin, tantalum and tungsten in the troubled eastern region of Democratic Republic of Congo has been achieved, says a report from the Enough Project, a Washington nonprofit group focused on Africa. Yet renewed fighting that began in the spring between regional militias and Congolese national troops, who are [...]
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The conclusion of the International Criminal Court’s first trial this summer was duly noted in global media and political circles. Yet little attention was paid to the equally landmark move by the court mandating reparations for victims of the atrocities committed by the man who was sentenced for the war crimes case, Thomas Lubanga of [...]
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Brigid Inder has been named the special gender adviser to Fatou Bensouda, the prosecutor for the International Criminal Court, or the ICC. With more than two decades of working in international and domestic justice, women’s human rights and as a political adviser in United Nations negotiations, Inder’s new role is to advise Bensouda’s office [...]
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Thomas Lubanga, the 52-year-old Congolese militant convicted by the International Criminal Court in March for the war crimes of conscripting and enlisting child soldiers under age 15 and using them in hostilities, was sentenced today to 14 years’ imprisonment. The children were forced to fight a conflict in northeastern Congo from Sept. 1, [...]
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Libyan authorities have released the four International Criminal Court staff members who have been held in Zintan after their visit on June 7, 2012, to Seif al-Islam el-Qaddafi, the son of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, to notify him of his legal rights. Qaddafi, in custody by Zintan militias, has been charged with crimes against humanity by [...]
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