DRC judges request training in The Hague

“We need experience in judging international crimes”. In a meeting with the highest official of the International Criminal Court, DRC military judges requested training with the ICC in The Hague in order to improve their skills.

Since 1999 militia groups fought for control of the gold-rich Ituri region in the East of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). The war is vastly complicated by the large amounts of small arms in the region and ethnic tensions between Hema and Lendu. The conflict killed an estimated 60,000 people and left hundreds of thousands homeless. Although the fighting officially stopped in 2003 the region remains unstable. Radio Netherlands reporter Helene Michaud joined ICC President Sang-Hyun Song during his visit to the Ituri region.

The military judges told ICC President Sang-Hyun Song during his first visit to the country last week that military courts in the DRC lack skills in drafting judgments related to international crimes such as war crimes and crimes against humanity. “At the ICC you have all the experts, with lots of experience, and our judges will stand to gain from interaction with those experts in The Hague,” they said.

Judge Innocent Mayembe, president of the Bunia military court in Ituri District, said that his was one of the first jurisdictions to have applied the Rome Statute that established the ICC and its functions.

Heroic judges

The court in Bunia has taken up a handful of cases which involved war crimes allegedly committed in the war-ravaged Ituri district. Judge Mayembe admitted that it had been difficult and even “heroic” to try to apply a legal instrument “that we do not know very well”.


In 2006, Judge Mayembe sentenced Mandro Panga Kawa, a former member of the militia led by Thomas Lubanga, now on trial in The Hague, to a 20-year prison term for the murder of 14 persons in a village massacre. The decision was later reversed by a higher tribunal.


According to Judge Mayembe, judges are often confronted with corruption and are submitted to psychological and political pressure. And despite efforts to reform the judiciary in Ituri district, at the national level, the system is still considered dysfunctional.


In addition, there are still no adequate means in Ituri to protect fearful witnesses in dealing with crimes against humanity.

Training needed

Currently in the DRC, military tribunals have the sole competence to judge international crimes. Colonel Nsimba Binyamwa, Deputy President at the High military court in Kinshasa, pointed out that it was still not yet clear which jurisdiction, military, civil, or a combination of both, will ultimately be allowed to judge war crimes in the DRC, but that it was important to train magistrates, as there are no appropriate programmes in Congolese universities.

“We would like to become familiar with the working methods used within the ICC. It is not enough to read a compilation of texts on international law”, he said.

Training in The Hague and exposure to the ICC’s working methods would help them judge the co-authors of the crimes that are now under scrutiny in The Hague. “This would also help us manage the participation of victims and witnesses in the trials”, said Judge Mayembe.


President Sung, the ICC’s highest official, responded that the ICC did not offer such training programmes, but that working visits for junior, not yet established members of the legal profession were possible. He referred him to the Clingendael Institute in the Netherlands and other institutions in the European Union and in the United States that can provide appropriate training.


President Song underscored the principle of complementarity between the international and national jurisdictions, with the ICC prosecuting the “big fish”, and the national courts small scale perpetrators.