Without a home

At the (mock) trial…

Mock ICC Pre-trial

A few months ago I participated in the mock International Criminal Court (ICC) pre-trial for Germain Katanga (aka Simba) while at the International Youth Leadership Conference (IYLC) in Prague. Katanga is a former leader of the Patriotic Resistance Force in Ituri in the Northeast of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). He is being tried by the ICC on six counts of war crimes and three counts of crimes against humanity. We were asked to focus our mock trial on 3 charges: using children under 15yrs to participate actively in hostilities, pillaging and sexual slavery. The ICC Pre-Trial serves to discern whether someone should in fact be tried in by the ICC and not in their own country. We were split up into teams: defence, prosecution and judges. We researched our case and overnight we prepared for the trial. The prosecution, which I was part of, brought forth evidence that the case could not be carried out in the DRC due to security reasons. We called a rape victim to give a witness’ account. While it was mostly role-play, we did use some real-life experiences from women in the DRC as testimony (womenforwomen.org). Our witness was gang raped and raped with several objects to the point that her urinary tract tore into her anal tract so that she couldn’t even control excreting. We tried to establish that the accused ordered his army to rape and pillage. We then showed a scene from the movie blood diamond – it shows child soldiers shooting aid workers. Two of the participants in the defence team were law students. They tried their best to build a case that there was no need for Katanga to be brought before the ICC. A participant from Namibia did a hilarious role play of the minister of justice on the stand (see the video here). I gave my closing arguments saying that a court case in DRC will not work due to lack of security and we should be proactive in changing the situation in the DRC starting with putting Katanga on trial. The defence team put forth a strong closing argument but in the end the judges decided that the case needs to go to the ICC for trial. We had won!

The facts

In July 2007 the International Criminal Court (ICC) Pre-Trial Chamber found reason to believe that Germain Katanga was responsible for war crimes as well as crimes against humanity and issued a warrant for his arrest. Just a few months later the Congolese authorities surrendered him to the ICC to stand trial on six counts of war crimes (wilful killing, inhuman treatment, using children under 15 yr to participate actively in hostilities, sexual slavery, intentionally directing attacks against civilians, and pillaging) and three counts of crimes against humanity (murder, inhumane acts and sexual slavery). Katanga, the second person to have been surrendered to the ICC since it was established, was flown to the ICC’s detention centre in The Hague. In September 2008 the charges against Katanga were confirmed and he was committed for trial before a Trial Chamber of the Court. Trial began in November 2009, but was prematurely suspended on 2 December 2009, when one of the presiding judges was involved in a car accident. Proceedings resumed in January this year and are still ongoing (http://www.icc-cpi.int) for more info.

While I don’t think many of us participating in the mock ICC pre-trial were unaware of the atrocities being committed in the DRC, the experience of going through the proceedings opened our eyes. After spending just a little bit of time researching the case and getting info about the problems in the DRC I realised that I knew very little about the situation. The point of the mock trial, and other activities at the conference, was to gain leadership skills but it did far more than that. It created a greater awareness of issues in the Congo and other places around the world.

Rape continues in the Congo – just last month there was a mass attack on women, young girls and some baby boys. In just four days, July 30 to August 3, more than 200 were gang-raped…