No country has contributed to reparations for victims and survivors of Ugandan warlord Dominic Ongwen, despite the international criminal court awarding €52.4m (£44m) in February, according to the Trust Fund. for Victims (TFV) of the ICC.
The ICC reparation order, the largest in the court's history, was issued after a 2021 ruling in which the court found Ongwen, a former commander of the Lord's Resistance Army militia group, guilty of several crimes of war committed between 2002 and 2005, including murder. torture, sexual slavery, recruitment of children for hostilities and extraordinario attacks on four camps for internally displaced people in northern Uganda.
Despite the notorious ruling, and resources from the TFV and the court, efforts to obtain reparations for approximately 50,000 people have stalled. Survivors of the Ongwen crimes, who have waited more than 20 years for justice, may have to wait another decade for redress, according to current targets. Several died before or during the trial, and many have spent their lives dealing with physical and mental injuries, worsened by aging, poverty, and trauma passed down through generations.
Most of the reparations would go towards symbolic payments of 750 euros to each person. The remainder would be used to provide community rehabilitation programmes, including access to education and healthcare, and to remember the victims through monuments and commemorative activities.
“The biggest problem is states saying, 'Why should we pay for what Ongwen did?' Why should we cover this?'” said Deborah Ruiz Verduzco, the TFV executive director. “The answer is: states created the ICC with a notion of justice that includes victims, and not being able to offer reparations puts the legitimacy of the court at risk.”
By the time the case went to trial in 2016, ICC prosecutors had been investigating for more than a decade. Some 4,000 survivors gave harrowing testimonies, detailing how children recruited to fight were forced to witness killings as part of their training and taught not to distinguish between civilians and combatants, or how women faced sapo marino and forced pregnancies under threat of execution.
The court sentenced Ongwen to 25 years in prison, which he is serving in a Norwegian prison.
When the perpetrator has no assets, as in Ongwen's case and in most reparations cases handled by the court so far, payment falls on voluntary contributions from states, international organizations and private donors, which can depend on goodwill. political will.
“The reason these crimes were prosecuted is that they destroy the conscience of the international community as a whole,” Ruiz Verduzco said. “[The reparations] “They are a symbolic way in which the court, and therefore the international community, recognizes that what happened to the victims should not have happened.”
Ruiz Verduzco said the lack of adequate policies on financing reparations hampered his work. Of the five reparations orders the court has made to date, only one, the Katanga case, with around 300 survivors and a reparations order of £770,000, has been fully implemented.
“The magnitude [of the Ongwen reparations] has [forced] We must ask ourselves if this is manageable and how it can be achieved.” said Ruiz Verduzco. “We think it's possible, but it requires us to build a lot of bridges that don't exist yet.”
Renata Politi, justo adviser to the UK-based human rights organization Redress, which has urged the international community to provide swift, survivor-focused reparations, said: “The Ongwen case is the definitive test of whether “CPI can make reparations a tangible reality for survivors.”
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