The International Criminal Court acquitted a Congolese militia leader Tuesday of all charges of commanding fighters who destroyed a strategic village in eastern Congo in 2003, raping and hacking to death some 200 people, including children.
The acquittal of Mathieu Ngudjolo Chui on charges including rape, murder and pillage was only the second verdict in the court’s 10-year history and the first time it had cleared a suspect.
It also cast a shadow over ICC prosecutors’ efforts to collect and present evidence of atrocities in complex conflicts thousands of miles from the court’s headquarters in The Hague.
Judges said the testimony of three key prosecution witnesses was unreliable and could not prove definitively that Ngudjolo led the rebel attack on the village of Bogoro, but they emphasized that Ngudjolo’s acquittal did not mean that no crimes occurred in the village.
“If an allegation has not been proven beyond a reasonable doubt ... this does not necessarily mean that the alleged fact did not occur," Presiding Judge Bruno Cotte of France said.
Eric Witte, an expert in international law at the Open Society Justice Initiative, said the judgment “will send a worrying signal about the quality of ICC prosecutions.”
He said Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda may now need to rethink the way her office builds its cases.
“A pattern of prosecution failures could undermine support for the court as a whole,” Witte warned.
The court has indicted far more senior suspects than Ngudjolo, including Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir and former Ivory Coast president Laurent Gbagbo. Al-Bashir refuses to surrender to the court and Gbagbo is in custody in The Hague awaiting a possible trial.
Prosecutors say many villagers in Bogoro were raped before some 200 were hacked to death with machetes by rebel fighters on a single day in February 2003.
Rights organizations immediately called upon the court to explain the acquittal to victims and survivors in the village in Congo’s eastern Ituri region, and to improve its investigations.
“The acquittal of Ngudjolo leaves the victims of Bogoro and other massacres by his forces without justice for their suffering,” said Géraldine Mattioli-Zeltner, international justice advocacy director at Human Rights Watch. “The ICC prosecutor needs to strengthen its investigations of those responsible for grave crimes in Ituri, including high-ranking officials in Congo, Rwanda and Uganda who supported the armed groups fighting there.”
Judges ordered Ngudjolo’s immediate release, but Bensouda said she would appeal the acquittals and asked for Ngudjolo to be kept in custody. The court scheduled a hearing for later Tuesday to consider the request.
Ngudjolo showed no emotion as Cotte acquitted him.
Parts of eastern Congo remain virtual war zones even today, with rebel fighters believed to be backed by Rwanda locked in conflict with government forces.
While Ngudjolo was the first defendant cleared by the ICC, other war crimes tribunals based in The Hague and elsewhere have acquitted other suspects from war zones such as the former Yugoslavia.
Judges are still considering the evidence against another militia leader who stood trial with Ngudjolo, Germain Katanga, and are expected to deliver that verdict next year.
The only other ICC verdict, handed down earlier this year, convicted another Congolese rebel leader, Thomas Lubanga, of using child soldiers in battles in Ituri. He was sentenced to 14 years in prison.
Ngudjolo’s lawyer, Jean-Pierre Kilenda, said his client had always insisted he was innocent.
Judges “showed that this court respects the rights of defendants,” the lawyer said
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