War crimes convictions overturned

• In a blow to prosecutors at the International Criminal Court and to victims of rape and murder in a conflict-ravaged African nation, appeals judges on Friday overturned the convictions of former Congolese vice-president Jean-Pierre Bemba for atrocities committed by his forces in Central African Republic.

The reversal delivered a serious setback to ICC prosecutors by scrapping all the convictions in the court’s first trial to focus largely on sexual violence and on command responsibility — the legal principle that a commanding officer can be held responsible for crimes committed by his or her troops or for failing to prevent or punish the crimes.

“We find it regrettable and troubling,” prosecutor Fatou Bensouda said. “And I can only regret that this significant and unexplained departure from the court’s previous jurisprudence ... has taken place in the most serious case of sexual and gender-based violence that has been decided upon by this court to date.”

The ruling could have implications for possible future convictions of commanding officers in other conflicts.

Bemba’s lawyer, Peter Haynes, welcomed the decision.

“It’s not some acquittal on a technicality,” he said. “They went to the very heart of a commander’s culpability, namely his responsibility to ensure that when put in the knowledge of crimes he takes steps to investigate them and punish them.”

Bemba was the most senior suspect convicted by the global court and his 18-year sentence was the highest handed down in the court’s history.

Bemba showed little emotion as Presiding Judge Christine Van den Wyngaert reversed his convictions.

The appeals chamber, in a 3-2 majority ruling, said the trial chamber “erred in its evaluation of Mr. Bemba’s motivation and the measures that he could have taken in light of the limitations he faced in investigating and prosecuting crimes as a remote commander sending troops to a foreign country.”

The appeals chamber also said Bemba was wrongly convicted for crimes that were not even included in the charges against him.

Bemba was found guilty in 2016 as a military commander of two counts of crimes against humanity and three counts of war crimes for a campaign of murder, rape and pillaging by his troops, known as the Movement for the Liberation of Congo, in 2002 and 2003.

He denied responsibility for the crimes. He was sentenced in 2016 to 18 years in prison.

Bemba has been in custody at the ICC for nearly a decade after authorities in Belgium arrested him there in 2008 and sent him to The Hague.