International Criminal Court judges on Tuesday began hearings to finalise charges against fugitive Ugandan warlord Joseph Kony.
Legal experts say the proceedings could act as a blueprint for other high-profile ICC suspects at large, including Russian President Vladimir Putin and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
“(Prosecutors) have their eyes in the long run on the possibility of using this procedure against Putin or Netanyahu if they continue to elude justice year after year,” international law professor Michael Scharf, of Case Western Reserve University told Reuters.
The ICC has come under attack from powerful non-member states like the United States and even some of its own members after it issued an arrest warrant for Netanyahu for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity in the Gaza conflict. Israel denies the accusations and rejects the ICC’s jurisdiction.
The ICC issued an arrest warrant against Russian President Vladimir Putin in March 2023, accusing him of the war crime of illegally deporting hundreds of children from Ukraine. The Kremlin has repeatedly denied the accusations.
Kony, the leader of the rebel Lord’s Resistance Army, is the ICC’s longest-standing fugitive. An arrest warrant was issued against him in 2005.
Deputy prosecutor Mame Mandiaye Niang said ICC prosecutors want to charge him with 39 counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity, including murder, rape, using child soldiers, sexual slavery and forced pregnancy, between 2002 and 2005.
“All these crimes were committed by the LRA under the command of Joseph Kony,” Niang told the court, adding that the children of northern Uganda lived in constant fear of attack and abductions during the LRA’s “systemic violence”.
In 2022 the ICC prosecutor’s office announced that it wanted to revive the case by having confirmation of charges hearings without Kony present. After renewed efforts to find Kony failed, judges allowed in absentia hearings.
A panel of three judges will have to confirm the charges after the hearings, where court-appointed lawyers will represent Kony’s interests.
Founded in the late 1980s with the aim of overthrowing the government, the LRA brutalised Ugandans under Kony’s leadership for nearly 20 years as it battled the military from bases in northern Uganda.
Kony’s victims were happy the ICC was moving forward with the case but lamented the lack of financial compensation for his alleged victims.
“All this money being wasted on symbolic trial of the man who is not around and whose whereabouts are not even known, I would rather it was used to compensate us,” Louis Lakor, a former LRA child soldier in northern Uganda, told Reuters.
