Legislative elections will be held on 26 November and 7 December this year in the small Himalayan republic. Unfortunately, for the time being, no political party has chosen to address the subject of transitional justice in its election campaign.

These elections are promising, however, because they are the first legislative elections since a Constituent Assembly was created in 2015, seven years after the monarchy was abolished.

Prosecute past crimes to stop future ones

Nepali transitional justice mechanisms that have emerged after nine years of heated discussions are a step forward, but their scope is still insufficient.

Indeed, hundreds of civil war victims and their loved ones are still waiting for compensation. More than 3,000 minors were forcibly recruited during the conflict and have since struggled to reintegrate into society.

Moreover, few victims are aware of their rights and the possibility to take their complaints to the United Nations if the local justice system fails them. This lack of information also contributes to the almost total impunity those responsible enjoy to this day.

Furthermore, human rights violations such as torture and arbitrary detentions did not disappear after the conflict ended: cases of abuse continue to be reported. Victims often come from less privileged backgrounds. The story of Bholi Pharaka illustrates this disheartening situation.

Towards a fairer society

Improving the population’s living conditions is achieved through transitional justice and respecting human rights in general. These rights should no longer be missing from political debates.

“Victims of human rights violations must find their place back in Nepali society,” insists Lucie Canal, interim Head of TRIAL International’s Nepal program. “To this end, the local judicial system must get rid of its inertia and make itself more accessible to victims.”

For more than a decade, Nepali and international civil society has fought against impunity in Nepal. It is now time for politicians to put their shoulder to the wheel.

Geneva, 9 November 2017 – After several days of uncertainty, the trial for the Kavumu rapes will finally open today in Bukavu (South Kivu). Nearly five years after the first attacks and following an international mobilization of supporters, 18 suspects are facing charges, including a local politician. The trial will be a turning point for the fight against impunity in DRC.

Today, international observers will pay close attention to the village of Kavumu in Congo’s eastern province of South Kivu. It will be the epicenter of one of the most anticipated trials of the year. The defendants are alleged members of an armed militia who, for years, abducted and raped children in this village.

The trial was originally planned to start on Monday 6 November. Due to the instable context in the region, it was postponed at the last moment to 9 November and then to 20 November. In a dramatic turn of events, the trial date changed again yesterday night, and was moved back to today, 9 November 2017.

“We are delighted that the trial will take place sooner rather than later“, says Daniele Perissi, Head of the DRC program at TRIAL International. “The victims have been waiting for years, they deserve a prompt and exemplary trial“.

A symbol of impunity

In just a few short years, Kavumu has been a symbol both of the large-scale crimes of sexual violence that have devastated the country, and a demonstration of the impunity with which those crimes are accompanied. The trial itself is one of the few of its kind and could set a crucial precedent.

The importance of Kavumu extends far beyond the impact on survivors and their families says Philip Grant, Director of TRIAL International. This trial punctures the code of silence and undermines the judicial inertia that often surrounds sexual violence cases in South Kivu. That authorities are now fully reckoning with this issue head-on is a huge step forward for Congolese justice.

The trial was supposed to end on Saturday 25 November. But at the request of the military court and after consulting the relevant partners, it was decided that the trial will continue until Thursday 30 November.

The sentence should be announced on Monday 4 December 2017.

For more information, a complete media kit is available in English and French.

UPDATE: due to unforeseen circumstances, the trial will start on 9 November 2017.

Bukavu, Geneva, New-York, 2 November 2017 – In the village of Kavumu in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), families once endured the unspeakable: children abducted in the night and raped. Nearly five years after the first attacks and after an international mobilization of supporters, a trial to prosecute the alleged offenders will begin on Monday, November 6. Eighteen suspects will face charges, including a local politician. The trial will be a turning point for the fight against impunity in DRC, and civil society both locally and internationally played a decisive role in bringing about this historic moment.

On Monday, November 6, international observers will pay close attention to the village of Kavumu in Congo’s eastern province of South Kivu. It will be the epicenter of one of the most anticipated trials of the year. The defendants are alleged members of an armed militia who, for years, abducted and raped children in this village.

In just a few short years, Kavumu has been a symbol both of the large-scale crimes of sexual violence that have devastated the country, and a demonstration of the impunity with which those crimes are accompanied. The trial itself is one of the few of its kind and could set a crucial precedent.

“The importance of Kavumu extends far beyond the impact on survivors and their families,” said the NGO TRIAL International. “This trial punctures the code of silence and undermines the judicial inertia that often surrounds sexual violence cases in South Kivu. That authorities are now fully reckoning with this issue head-on is a huge step forward for Congolese justice.”

Babies among the victims

Some of the agony of these cases is due to the age of the 46 victims – some as young as just a year old when they were raped. The attacks also fit a similar pattern that was repeated over the course of many years.

“The perpetrators broke into our houses at night to kidnap our daughters,” said a mother of a victim who asked for anonymity to protect her from reprisals. “They raped them out of pure superstition, and many suffered injuries that will linger with them the rest of their lives.”

Urged on by a concerned international community and courageous civil society members, the Kavumu military prosecutor took over the case in 2016. During the investigation, 18 suspects were charged with crimes against humanity, since their alleged crimes were both numerous and systematic.

NGOs on the front line

 The trial in Kavumu will take place thanks to the mobilization of both Congolese and international civil society groups. Together, they combined their expertise to draw the attention of national authorities and help to build a solid case against the alleged offenders.

“We are hopeful that our combined efforts will allow survivors and their families to finally obtain justice and live in peace after so much pain,” said the NGO Physicians for Human Rights, which has supported investigative efforts in Kavumu since the first rape cases were reported. “We are hopeful this process will hold perpetrators accountable for their crimes. And we hope that the collaboration between the medical and legal communities, as well as international and national NGOs, can sustain an effective response system that can prevent future instances of sexual violence.”

 An additional difficulty was the vulnerability of the survivors, all of whom were children at the time of the attacks.

“These children relive the aggression perpetrated against them every time they tell their story. The trial’s proceedings are demanding and require deep psychological support,” said Panzi Hospital, which specializes in the treatment of survivors of sexual violence.

 On the legal front, the challenge will be proving the systematic nature of the attacks. In order to make a case of crimes against humanity, prosecutors must show that the crimes were part of an organized endeavor, a high bar in a country as unstable as DRC.

“We have been waiting years for this trial to begin, as have the families of all the survivors,” said the NGO community working on these cases. “We now hope that the trial will be conducted in good faith and that the Congolese justice system will justly punish the offenders proportional to the gravity of their crimes.”

Kavumu is a particularly poor village situated in the province of South Kivu, in Eastern DRC. Not far from the provincial capital Bukavu, this zone has been the theatre of extreme violence for years, with groups fighting for power over land and resources.

The facts

Between 2013 and 2016 in the village of Kavumu, over forty young girls aged 13 months to 12 years have been abducted at night and raped.

Each case followed the same modus operandi: after having been kidnapped by one or several men, the victim was raped and her hymnal blood collected – sometimes with the help of a sharp object – before she was abandoned on the spot. The majority of these girls now suffer permanent damage to their genital organs and are heavily traumatized.

Initially, these attacks were considered as isolated events and treated as such by the local judicial authorities. Psychologically vulnerable, the victims and their families nevertheless found the courage to approach the local prosecutor.

However, in spite of the intervention of a Task Force set up by the NGO Physicians for Human Rights, no action was undertaken. It is only in mid-2015 that the national government recognized these crimes were of crucial importance for the authorities in Kinshasa.

Procedure

At the beginning of 2016, following the integration of TRIAL International to the Task Force, a new legal strategy was adopted.

The victims’ lawyers asked the military prosecutor to take up the case, invoking that the crimes were linked together. In fact, the existence of a systematic or generalized attack on civilians meant these facts could be qualified as crimes against humanity.

The military prosecutor agreed to the request and opened an inquiry for mass crimes.

In June 2016, the first evidence collected by the police led to the arrest of Frederic Batumike. This provincial representative (and member of the Provicial Assembly of Bukavu) was arrested alongside 70 other individuals suspected of belonging to a militia responsible for the rapes of Kavumu. That same militia is suspected of having orchestrated deadly attacks against local human rights defenders and military settlements.

The age of the victims and the way the crimes were committed (by night while the parents were sleeping, without witnesses and using drugs to keep the victims unconscious) led the authorities to collaborate with the Task Force. Together, they investigated and collected the necessary evidence to corroborate the prosecution’s arguments.

In September 2017, the military prosecutor indicted 18 individuals for rape as crimes against humanity and additional crimes such as murder, organization in a militia and attacks against Congolese military settlements.

According to the indictment, Batumike has created and organized the militia, and ordered the commission of these crimes. The other 17 are accused of participating to a militia and contributing to the aforementioned crimes.

The criminal trial was initially planned from 6 to 23 November 2017. Due to unforeseen circumstances it has been rescheduled to start on 9 November 2017.

On 13 December 2017, the first judgment rendered justice to Kavumu’s children : 11 Congolese militia members, were convicted of crimes against humanity for murder and the rape of 37 young children.

On 12 June 2018, the appeal hearings were initiated in Bukavu before the Congolese Military High Court.

On 26 July 2018, the High Military Court of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (HMC) has confirmed the condemnation of all 11 accused in the Kavumu case.

Watch the testimony of one of the young girls’ father

Today, Burundi’s withdrawal from the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC) will come into effect – a sad precedent for international justice.

Exactly one year ago, Burundi announced its intention to leave the ICC, the first permanent organ competent to judge the gravest crimes. This announcement was followed by similar declarations from the Gambia and South Africa, but both countries have backpedaled since and chose to remain under the Court’s jurisdiction.

“We are disappointed that Burundi stubbornly continued on that path, in spite of its civil society’s strong mobilization”, says Pamela Capizzi, Head of the Burundi program at TRIAL International. “Just like with the UN Commission of Inquiry, the government has walled itself into contrariness and opposition.”

From enthusiasm to defiance

This divorce is all the more disappointing because Burundi, like many other African States, had been instrumental to the ICC’s creation. While European countries were skeptical about the success of such an endeavor, they drummed up and led a proactive campaign for international justice.

How to explain this U-turn? “The fact is that a strong-willed international justice is disruptive. Some States perhaps thought that their own creation would not turn against them, that it would be confined to trying their opponents. By opening a preliminary examination on Burundi last April, the Office of the Prosecutor of the ICC showed that it would not be the case”, explains Philip Grant, TRIAL International’ Director.

Burundi’s withdrawal will not impede the ICC’s ongoing preliminary examination. If the criteria are fulfilled, it could still lead to the opening of an inquiry and, if applicable, a trial.

Read more about the links between Burundi and the ICC
Read more about the ICC’s jurisdiction criteria

(Banjul, The Gambia, October 21, 2017) – Victims of the former Gambian government of Yahya Jammeh and Gambian and international activists today announced the formation of a campaign to bring Jammeh and his leading accomplices to justice.

Jammeh fled The Gambia in January 2017 for exile in Equatorial Guinea after losing presidential elections to current president Adama Barrow. In 22 years of autocratic rule, Jammeh’s government used killings, “disappearances,” torture, intimidation, sexual violence, and arbitrary arrests to suppress dissent and preserve its grip on power.

“We will do whatever it takes in the pursuit of justice, no matter how long it takes” said Fatoumatta Sandeng, daughter of opposition leader Solo Sandeng whose murder in April 2016 galvanized opposition to the Jammeh government, and who is spokesperson for the new  “Campaign to Bring Yahya Jammeh and his Accomplices to Justice”. “All that matters is that Jammeh and his accomplices are held accountable for what they did to the Gambian people.”

The objective of the Campaign is the fair trial for alleged crimes of Yahya Jammeh, as well as of those who bear the greatest responsibility in the abuses of his government.  The Coalition said it would also seek to strengthen the voice of the victims in Gambia’s current transitional process and to help the Gambian government recover Jammeh’s assets.

“Given what so many of us experienced and the depths to which Jammeh took The Gambia, we have a moral duty to ensure that justice is done,” said Amadou Scattred Janneh, who was sentenced to life imprisonment under Jammeh for making T-shirts with the slogan “End Dictatorship Now.” “By bringing Jammeh to justice, we also serve notice to tyrants across the continent that we the people are determined to fight impunity.”

Some of the other victims at the Campaign’s inaugural press briefing were Imam Baba Leigh, a Muslim cleric who was savagely tortured and detained incommunicado for five months in 2012-2013; Baba Hydra, son of Deyda Hydra, editor of the Point newspaper and president of the Gambia Press Union, who was murdered in 2004; Nana-Jo Ndow whose father, the opponent Saul Ndow disappeared in 2013 and is presumed to have been killed, and Ayeesha Jammeh, whose father Haruna Jammeh, and her sister Marcie, cousins of Yahya Jammeh disappeared in 2005.

Also speaking at the conference were Tutu Alicante, head of EG Justice, the leading organization campaigning for human rights in Equatorial Guinea, and Bénédict de Moerloose of TRIAL International which was instrumental in the arrest of Jammeh’s former Interior Minister Ousman Sonko in Switzerland, where he faces trial on torture charges.

“As a people living for almost four decades under brutal dictatorship, we Equatoguineans feel compelled to try to help our Gambian brothers and sisters get the justice that we have been denied,” said Tutu Alicante, Head of EG Justice: the leading organization  campaigning for human rights in Equatorial Guinea. “The success of the Gambian victims will be the success of all Africans.”

The Campaign said that it would seek Jammeh’s extradition for trial in The Gambia, but that this could take several years as political, security and institutional concerns must first be addressed before Jammeh could get a fair trial that would help promote the rule of law in The Gambia.

The groups participating in the Campaign include: The Gambia Center for Victims of Human Rights Violations, the Institute for Human Rights and Development in Africa,  Article 19 West Africa, Coalition for Change in Gambia, TANGO, EG Justice (Equatorial Guinea), TRIAL International (Switzerland), Human Rights Watch,  Guernica 37 International Justice Chambers,   Aids-Free World and La Fondation pour l’égalité des chances en Afrique. Reed Brody, the Human Rights Watch lawyer instrumental in the campaign to bring to justice the former Chadian dictator Hissène Habré, is advising the Campaign.

The campaign is supported in part by the Fondation pour l’égalité des chances en Afrique. “This campaign sends a strong message: no African leader suspected of crimes against humanity should think that he is above the law or out of reach of his victims,” said Mohamed Bouamatou of Mauritania, president of the Foundation.

Patient Iraguha, Legal Officer at TRIAL International, documents mass crimes in DRC’s most remote areas. A laborious and sometimes dangerous exercise, but a necessary one for victims to regain trust in justice.

For the past three years, TRIAL International has been undertaking evidence-collection missions directly where serious crimes were committed. This action was based upon the two-fold observation that the time lapse between the commission of the crime and its prosecution played a role in the disappearance of pieces of evidence; and that the perpetrators of mass crimes were sometimes acquitted due to lack of evidence. To remedy that, there was only one solution: travelling to the crime scene, in remote and sometimes dangerous areas. It’s the price to pay to build a solid case.

The evidence we gather includes accounts from victims, medical records and certificates, testimonies from local authorities, pictures or even videos.

Working in a conflict zone

The first difficulty pertaining to evidence collection is the unstable security situation. We sometimes intervene in zones where armed groups are still active.

It may be only in hindsight that we recognize the risks involved: last year, I collected testimonies from locality leaders where crimes had been committed. It’s only much later that I realized how closely related they were to the political-military group that was committing these atrocities. We are operating in an extremely volatile context, wherein everything has to be thoroughly analyzed.

Insecurity is also an obstacle for the victims: the fear of reprisals often inhibits their voice. Their security is our primary concern.

A thirst for justice

The victims we meet often expect a lot from documentation missions. We may be the first to listen to their stories, to try to understand them. Many Congolese have lost faith in justice and ask us to explain the authorities’ silence.

On the other hand, the torturers’ impunity may give some victims a thirst for justice. They are all the more determined to speak. It’s their courage that gives me the energy to pursue my work.

One day, I met a woman who had suffered terrible violence. She had lost everything and lived in exile, whereas the perpetrators remained free. While I was asking her questions, she inquired: “Sir, do you really believe that justice exists here?”

I responded that we had to believe so, even if the path could seem strewn with obstacles. This answer summarizes all the difficulty of working with victims. Our concern is always to balance between rebuilding their faith and courage, and remaining frank because, in DRC, the journey to justice is generally very long.

Patient Iraguha, DRC Legal Officer

Watch the testimony of a victim

War scars are difficult to overcome, both at the psychological and societal level. Legal and Communications Officer Adisa Fišić Barukčija examines arts as a seldom-explored avenue for healing.

Risking one’s life for a moment of freedom

It is hard to imagine people risking their lives to attend a movie screening. Yet this is what happened during the siege of Sarajevo, even as the city was shelled on a daily basis.

Despite the omnipresence of violence, cultural life remained vibrant throughout the war in Bosnia & Herzegovina: hundreds of concerts, theatre plays, and other cultural events flourished in improvised venues across Sarajevo. For civilians, these cultural events were a neutral space where they could, for a small amount of time, forget about their terrible situation.

Art therapy: a safe haven of healing

After the war, survivors who underwent trauma participated in creative art therapy. People who suffer from psychological wounds often find it difficult to discuss their experiences orally, even with a professional therapist. Art therapies have proven to be effective because they do not necessarily require people to speak.

They can also help people dealing with repressed memories. Some people do not have any recollection of the disturbing events they suffered. Art therapy can be a way to bring these memories back to the surface to help the healing process.

Culture and art bring people together

Decades after the conflict, this period still inspires artists, no less because divisions are still a reality in today’s Bosnia and Herzegovina. Even children who did not live through the war grow up with destructive narratives that shape their opinion about the past, exacerbating divisions.

When the Sarajevo Film Festival was created at the end of the war, one of its goals was to facilitate dialogue among communities. The organizers initiated a “Dealing with the past” program to give voice to personal stories from all sides. Understanding the suffering of others is essential to fostering empathy among communities and improving their interactions.

Post-conflict countries generally focus on security and social welfare, at the expense of culture. But the arts should not be neglected as they can provide a space for questions, dialogue, and hopefully reconciliation.

Adisa Fišić Barukčija, Legal and communications officer
@AdisaFisic

In 2017, TRIAL International and the NGO WITNESS have put together a unique training in DRC: how to use video to fight impunity.

TRIAL International usually teaches purely legal notions; it is the first time it offers training on information technologies for judiciary purposes.

Congolese lawyers have learned to document and collect evidence for international crimes armed solely with their cameras or smartphones.

The training’s content, feedback from participants and comments from the organizers can be found on Storify.