The International Criminal Court, ICC has sentenced Ugandan former child soldier turned into rebel commander to 25 years’ imprisonment on Thursday.
Presiding Judge Bertram Schmitt said Ongwen’s own abduction as a schoolboy and history as a child soldier prevented him being sentenced to life.
Schmitt said that judges had to weigh Ongwen’s brutality and victims’ wishes for justice against his own tortured past when deciding on a sentence.
He added that Ongwen could have fled the LRA, was not always in a position of total subordination to its leader Joseph Kony and committed some of the crimes in private.
Ongwen, showed no emotion as he heard that the three-judge panel had given him a sentence five years longer than the 20 years prosecutors requested.
In February, Dominic Ongwen was convicted of 61 war crimes and crimes against humanity including murder, rape, forced marriage, forced pregnancy and using child soldiers as a commander in the shadowy Lord’s Resistance Army.
His lawyers have said they will appeal the conviction. Ongwen’s defense lawyers have always cast him as a victim of the LRA’s brutality who was traumatized after being abducted as a 9-year-old schoolboy and turned into a child soldier in the group’s insurgency.
But judges in February ruled that he committed the crimes “as a fully responsible adult, as a commander of the LRA in his mid- to late 20s.”
Ongwen is the first commander of the LRA to face justice at the global court and his convictions for gender-based crimes are significant for prosecutors keen to punish such atrocities.
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