The International Crimes Division (ICD) in Gulu City will today confirm and decide whether the remanded Lord’s Resistance Army former commander, Thomas Kwoyelo, has a case to answer or not.
Kwoyelo is facing at least 93 counts of charges ranging from war crimes to crimes against humanity to sexual violence, murder, kidnap, robbery, among others.
He has been in detention since March 2009 when he was captured by the UPDF soldiers in Garamba National Park in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Kwoyelo is the first person to be tried by Uganda’s new International Crimes Division (ICD), a division of Uganda’s High Court. Initially known as the War Crimes Division, it was set up in 2009 by the Ugandan government as part of its efforts to implement the 2008 Juba peace agreements between the Ugandan government and the LRA.
The division has the authority to try genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, terrorism, human trafficking, piracy and any other international crime defined in Uganda’s Penal Code Act, the 1964 Geneva Conventions Act, the 2010 International Criminal Court Act (ICCA), or any other criminal
The ICCA—which defines crimes against humanity, war crimes, and genocide as domestic offenses in Uganda—does not contain any explicit provision stating that it can be applied to crimes committed before the law’s enactment in June 2010, and so according to Uganda’s Directorate of Public Prosecutions (DPP), it should not be.
