On 15 December 2017, the International Criminal Court (ICC) Trial Chamber II found Thomas Lubanga Dyilo, former President and Commander-in-Chief of the UPC/FPLC, responsible for reparations in the amount of USD 10,000,000 — the largest ICC reparations order issued to-date. The Lubanga case was the first to reach the reparations stage — yet controversy surrounding procedural requirements delayed the Chamber’s determination of Lubanga’s monetary liability. Last month’s decision answered some of these procedural questions, and raised new ones. This piece breaks down Trial Chamber II’s 15 December 2017 decision, and situates it alongside Trial Chambers’ recent assessments of monetary liability in the Katanga and Al Mahdi cases. We suggest that we have now seen ICC Trial Chambers assess defendants’ monetary liability for reparations via formal, functional, and intermediate approaches.
Lubanga was convicted on 14 March 2012 of enlisting and conscripting children under the age of 15, and using them to actively participate in hostilities from 1 September 2002 until 13 August 2003. On 7 August 2012, Trial Chamber I delivered the ICC’s first-ever order for reparations, authorising only collective reparations. On 3 March 2015, the Appeals Chamber overturned part of the Trial Chamber’s decision and issued an amended order for reparations, giving a newly constituted Trial Chamber II (composed of Judges Brichambaut, Herrera Carbuccia and Kovács) the confined tasks of a) determining the amount for which Lubanga was responsible, and b) monitoring and overseeing the implementation of the order. In its Judgment and order, the Appeals Chamber did not identify the number of victims who suffered harm as a result of Lubanga’s crimes. Nor had Trial Chamber I provided a figure in its original Judgment, although it found the crimes were widespread.
As explained in an article published last year, heated procedural debates soon emerged, as Trial Chamber II and the Trust Fund for Victims (TFV) clashed in their understandings of their respective mandates: while the Chamber believed it needed to identify and “approve” victims entitled to reparations as a prerequisite to determining Lubanga’s monetary liability, the TFV believed this was unnecessary, and something the TFV should do during implementation (the TFV had estimated there were 3,000 potentially eligible victims). Similarly, while the Trial Chamber believed that it needed to determine the extent of the harm caused to victims to establish Lubanga’s liability, the TFV thought that the extent of the harm was already described adequately in the Judgment, Sentencing Decision, and decisions on victims participation. However, in what appeared to be a change of its original position, the Trial Chamber acknowledged mid-proceedings that the victims identified by the TFV were a sample, but did not comprise the totality, of victims potentially eligible for reparations, namely those who suffered harm as a result of the crimes for which Lubanga was convicted. This shift proved foundational to the Trial Chamber’s 15 December 2017 decision. Read the rest of this entry…
