The appeals chamber of the International Criminal Court (ICC) has rejected a claim by Congolese militia leader Germain Katanga that he should not be prosecuted before the ICC.

Katanga asked that the case be dismissed, arguing that the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) was able to prosecute him, and that the ICC prosecutor failed to disclose documents indicating that he was under investigation in the DRC.

Katanga had challenged the admissibility of his case in February, but in June the appeals chamber upheld a decision by the trial chamber that the case should stand. It is the first time that the ICC has heard an admissibility challenge based on the complementarity principle, which states that the ICC should not step in unless states concerned are genuinely unable or unwilling to start proceedings.

In rendering the appeals decision, Judge Daniel David Ntanda Nsereko said that “at the time of the admissibility proceedings in the present case, there were no proceedings against Mr Katanga in the DRC, whether for the crimes with which he is charged before this court, or for other alleged crimes. On the contrary, the DRC has made it clear that it wished for him to be prosecuted before the ICC.”

A senior commander of the Force de Résistance Patriotique en Ituri, Katanga was transferred to The Hague in October 2007. He faces three counts of crimes against humanity and six counts of war crimes relating to his alleged involvement in a 2003 attack on the village of Bogoro, in Ituri. About 200 people were killed in the assault and many women forced into sexual slavery. The trial, which is being held in conjunction with the case of Mathieu Ngudjolo Chui, is scheduled to start in late November.

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