[Nicole Fritz is director of the Southern Africa Litigation Centre. She kindly agreed to let us post the following piece which first appeared as an op-ed in the Business Day on 22 February 2011]
The world of international criminal justice has offered lots of theatrics in recent weeks. Courtenay Griffiths, lead defence counsel for Charles Taylor on trial in The Hague before the Special Court for Sierra Leone, stormed out of court, refusing to reappear. His client took the opportunity to excuse himself too. Then there was the International Criminal Court’s (ICC’s) prosecutor, Luis Moreno Ocampo, never one for understatement, intoning: "The world needs legal limits. We need a platform to live together. That is the International Criminal Court." The African Union Commission’s chairman Jean Ping, equally adept at the rhetorical flourish, opined: "Frankly speaking, we are not against the International Criminal Court. What we are against is Ocampo’s justice — the justice of a man."
The disinterested observer might conclude that with all these egos in play, and with so many elevated platforms to play on, the world of international criminal justice probably has little room for justice. But there was another development last week — far less noted — which speaks to what international criminal justice, absent the big egos, might yield. Eleven soldiers from the Democratic Republic of Congo went on trial, accused of raping more than 60 women on New Year’s Day. in the town of Fizi in South Kivu province.
The accused have not only been charged with rape and imprisonment but, given the systematic nature of the crimes, have also been charged with crimes against humanity. What’s noteworthy here is that these trials are not being heard far from the affected communities — as is the case with Taylor’s trial or any of the cases likely to be heard by the ICC. Rather, they are being heard before an innovative mobile gender court in Fizi’s neighbouring town of Baraka. Nor, as so often happens with crimes of this kind, have these cases taken years to come to trial. It has taken less than two months since the crimes were committed for the trials to commence. It isn’t merely low-level officers being prosecuted, which might suggest this type of innovative prosecution procedure is suitable for less powerful actors but that higher-level authorities still need to command the type of expensive trials reserved for Taylor or Slobodan Milosevic. Among the soldiers prosecuted is commanding officer Lt. Col Mutware Kibibi. The attack on the population of Fizi is said to be the largest single atrocity involving the government’s army.
Quite apart from the innovative mobile gender court, it is the Congolese government’s co-operation in the process — aimed at holding its own troops to account — that makes these trials so remarkable. Typically, government actors, when accused of grave human rights violations, use state machinery not to secure accountability but to avoid it. It is why international criminal justice often happens only outside the country where the crimes were committed. In this instance, in the arrest and prosecution of Kibibi, the Congo’s government is making good on its promise of a "zero tolerance policy will be enforced on the spot in Fizi".
Several factors help explain the Congolese government’s stance. Chief among them is the fact that the Congo has attracted international approbation for its reputation as the "rape capital" of the world and that it can’t look to international assistance in countering vicious attacks on its civilian population by several different militia groups when its own army engages in similar atrocities. But it would also be hard to paint the efforts of the mobile gender court as alien to the interests of the Congo’s population, as a number of African leaders have tried to do of, by contrast, the efforts of the ICC. Since its start in October 2009, the Congo’s mobile gender court has conducted about 10 trials a month and has secured 94 rape convictions. It has also trained 150 judicial police officers, 80 lawyers and 30 magistrates. As the mobile gender court is integrated in the Congo’s justice system, the skills and resources invested by outside donors not only secure convictions and accountability but point the way to a fully functioning, comprehensive domestic judicial system for the Congo.
The mobile gender court also points the way to enhanced delivery of international criminal justice, which is almost always preferably secured, if properly done, before local courts and affected local communities — very, very far from the grandstanding of Griffiths, Ocampo and Ping.