Race, Culture and Mental Illness in the International Criminal Court’s Ongwen Judgment: Biases and Blindspots

Beth S. Lyons, Beth S. Lyons

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2024
• Print ISBN: 9783031736827
• eBook ISBN: 9783031736834
• Topic: Law
• Subtopic: Civil Rights in Law
• Index: Law

Dominic Ongwen was abducted in 1987 when he was 8 or 9 years old  by the Lord's Resistance Army ('LRA') in Northern Uganda and trafficked as a child soldier; he made multiple unsuccessful attempts to escape, and finally succeeded in late 2014.  He turned himself into the International Criminal Court in 2015 and was prosecuted.  Mr. Ongwen's defence was that he was not responsible for the crimes of the LRA, based on his mental illnesses and duress, stemming from his abduction and subsequent coercion and indoctrination under Joseph Kony within the LRA. In February 2021, the ICC's Trial Chamber IX convicted Dominic Ongwen of 61 charges and two modes of liability and he was sentenced to 25 years incarceration.

This work critiques the judicial racial and cultural biases and blindspots in the Ongwen Judgment rendered by the ICC, as related to the affirmative defences of mental disease or defect and duress and to sentencing, from the perspective of the author who served as a defence counsel in the case.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. If Black Were White: The Impact of Racial and Cultural Biases and Blindspots on the International Criminal Court’s Ongwen Trial Judgment
• 2. Getting Disability and Reasonable Accommodation Right: What Went Wrong in the Ongwen Case and the Need for a Presumption of Mental Disability for Defendants
• 3. Conclusions
• Back Matter