The International Criminal Court (ICC) has ordered two Congolese warlords to stand trial on charges including murder, rape and the use of child soldiers for their alleged role in a deadly attack on a village.
The case against Germain Katanga and Mathieu Ngudjolo is only the second sent for trial at the world’s first permanent war crimes court.
They are accused of leading militias, including child soldiers who attacked the village of Bogoro in eastern Congo in 2003.
Prosecutors say more than 200 people, including women and children, were killed in the attack, many hacked to death with machetes.
Women who survived were raped and then held in camps as sexual slaves, the court’s deputy prosecutor Fatou Bensouda told the court earlier this year.
Following a preliminary hearing of evidence in June, a three-judge panel ruled that Katanga and Ngudjolo should stand trial on seven counts of war crimes, including willful killing, pillage, using child soldiers and three crimes against humanity: murder, rape and sexual slavery.
No date has been set for the trial, which was ordered on Friday.
Katanga and Ngudjolo, who are both in custody at the court’s detention unit in a Hague seaside suburb, are expected to enter pleas to the charges when the trial starts.
The only other person sent for trial by the court is another Congolese warlord, Thomas Lubanga, who also is charged with using child soldiers. His case is currently stalled amid a dispute over confidential evidence provided to prosecutors by the UN.
All three men were warlords in the lawless Ituri region of eastern Congo, which has been torn apart by years of ethnic fighting.
Carine Bapita, a lawyer for one survivor, told judges in June that the woman, identified only as A012, “lost also six of her children, killed with machete blows, and of course all of her cows and property.”
Christian Hemedi, a human rights activist from Congo, welcomed the court’s decision to send Katanga and Ngudjolo to trial, saying it “offers tremendous hope to victims in Ituri that justice can be achieved.”
Hemedi, head of the Congo National Coalition for the ICC, said the ruling “represents progress for human rights defenders fighting tirelessly against impunity in [Congo].”
The ICC was set up in 2002 as the world’s first global war crimes court. It has filed charges against alleged war criminals in Congo, Central African Republic, Uganda and Sudan.
In their most high-profile case, prosecutors asked judges to issue an arrest warrant for Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir, accusing him of genocide in the country’s war-ravaged Darfur region.
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