Trial of Thomas Lubanga Dyilo

Thomas Lubanga Dyilo:

Alleged founder of Union des Patriotes Congolais (UPC) and the Forces patriotiques pour la libération du Congo(FPLC); Alleged former Commander-in-Chief of the FPLC, since September 2002 and at least until the end of 2003. Alleged president of the UPC.

Charges:

1. Enlisting and conscripting of children under the age of 15 years into the FPLC and using them to participate actively in hostilities in the context of an international armed conflict from early September 2002 to 2 June 2003.
2. Enlisting and conscripting children under the age of 15 years into the FPLC and using them to participate actively in hostilities in the context of an armed conflict not of an international character from 2 June 2003 to 13 August 2003.

Links

• The International Criminal Court
• Case information sheet
• International Justice Tribune
• The Lubanga Trial at the International Criminal Court
• Thomas Lubanga Dyilo (TRIAL)

 

The International Criminal Court (ICC) has ordered the release of Congolese militia leader Thomas Lubanga Dyilo whose war crimes trial in The Hague was suspended last week. The ICC ruled on Thursday that Lubanga should be freed unless prosecutors mount an appeal within five days. 

Judge Adrian Fulford said Lubanga should be "freed without conditions" as his detention "is no longer fair" given the suspension of the trial. He "cannot be held in preventative custody on a speculative basis, namely that at some stage in the future the proceedings may be resurrected."

But he added that Lubanga must remain behind bars for another five days to give the prosecution time to file an appeal against the earlier postponement of the trial.

If such an appeal is allowed, he will have to stay in prison until that process has been finalised. The prosecutor's office announced on Monday that they would file an appeal.

"Justice cannot be done"
The prosecution used middlemen in the Democratic Republic of Congo to find some of the witnesses, but refused to disclose the name of one of the intermediaries as ordered.

The ICC judges stayed proceedings in Thomas Lubanga's trial last week because the prosecution refused to implement their orders. They said “a fair trial is no longer possible and justice cannot be done, not least because the judges will have lost control of a significant aspect of the trial proceedings.”

The prosecutors’ “unequivocal refusal to implement repeated orders” to disclose the intermediary's identity to the defence, make it “necessary to stay these proceedings as an abuse of the process of the court,” the ruling added.

After Lubanga’s defence claimed that prosecution intermediaries bribed and coached witnesses to provide false testimony, judges ordered the prosecutors to call two intermediaries to testify and to disclose the name of a middleman known as “intermediary 143’’.

ICC chief prosecutor Luis Moreno Ocampo refused, saying it could put the intermediary’s safety at risk.

Child soldiers
49-year old Thomas Lubanga Dyilo is charged with war crimes for using children under the age of 15 to fight for his militia during the 1997-2002 civil war in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Prosecutors allege that his militia abducted children as young as 11 from their homes, schools and football fields and took them to military training camps where they were beaten and drugged. The girls among them were used as sex slaves.

Lubanga's trial, the ICC's first, was initially to have started in June 2008 but was stalled when the court ruled that prosecution had wrongly withheld evidence potentially favourable to his defence. The first witness at the trial retracted his testimony after first saying he had been recruited by Lubanga's fighters on his way home from school.

Read more: ICC's first trial at risk as prosecution ignores judges' orders