{"id":2047,"date":"2023-12-18T14:31:00","date_gmt":"2023-12-18T13:31:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.hirondelle.org\/facilitating-media-access-to-trials"},"modified":"2023-12-18T14:31:00","modified_gmt":"2023-12-18T13:31:00","slug":"facilitating-media-access-to-trials","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.hirondelle.org\/en\/facilitating-media-access-to-trials","title":{"rendered":"Facilitating media access to trials"},"content":{"rendered":"

Daniele Perissi heads the Great Lakes\u00a0programme of Swiss NGO TRIAL\u00a0International, which helps victims of\u00a0international crimes obtain justice. He\u00a0explains how international justice and its\u00a0relationship with the media are being reinvented in DR Congo.<\/strong><\/p>\n

With the ICTR (International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda) and the International Criminal\u00a0Court\u2019s (ICC) investigations in DR Congo, the Great\u00a0Lakes is a region where international justice was\u00a0very active until the mid-2010s. Is this still the\u00a0case today?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Daniele Perissi:<\/b> Yes, but given the slowness of\u00a0the ICC’s investigations, it is the Congolese military\u00a0justice system that has recently taken up several\u00a0international crimes, with inventiveness and efficiency.\u00a0In September 2021, the Military Court of South Kivu\u00a0sentenced a militia leader to life imprisonment for\u00a0mass crimes, including environmental crimes in a case\u00a0of exploitation by terror of natural resources in the\u00a0Kahuzi Biega National Park, a UNESCO World Heritage\u00a0Site. It also convicted him of the environmental\u00a0crime of destroying a protected area. Six months\u00a0earlier, the Congolese military courts had sentenced\u00a0to life imprisonment a commander of the armed\u00a0group Kamuina Nsapu who committed war crimes\u00a0in the Kasai between 2016 and 2019. The judges\u00a0awarded reparations to the 232 declared victims, and\u00a0acknowledged that the Congolese state also bore\u00a0some responsibility because it had not done enough\u00a0to protect the civilian population. And in 2017,\u00a0Congolese military justice sentenced 11 militiamen\u00a0to life imprisonment for some 40 rapes committed\u00a0between 2013 and 2016 on young girls aged\u00a0between 2 and 12 in the village of Kavumu (South\u00a0Kivu). The court found\u00a0that, although scattered\u00a0over time, these crimes\u00a0were linked and\u00a0constituted a systematic\u00a0attack against a civilian\u00a0population, qualifying\u00a0as a crime against\u00a0humanity.<\/p>\n

These trials take a very particular form, with mobile\u00a0courts. The hearings do not take place in the courthouse of a major city, but in the areas directly affected by the crimes on trial. In other words, the\u00a0entire military court, with its prosecutors, court clerks,\u00a0lawyers and defendants, travels as close as possible\u00a0to the victims.<\/p>\n

TRIAL International supports the victims of these\u00a0crimes. What do you expect from the media?<\/strong><\/p>\n

While they have the advantage of being as close as\u00a0possible to the victims, mobile court trials have the\u00a0disadvantage of being held in inaccessible locations,\u00a0far from the major cities and therefore from Congolese\u00a0journalists. We therefore inform them and facilitate\u00a0their access to the trial sites, so that they can produce\u00a0reports and the trials can be understood by the whole\u00a0population. The international media also play an\u00a0important role. In the Kavumu case, it was a welldocumented article in the US bimonthly Foreign\u00a0Policy that prompted the Congolese government to\u00a0open a national inquiry, when it was seeking instead\u00a0to turn a blind eye to these crimes to stop being\u00a0labelled “rape capital of the world”.<\/p>\n

Trials are sometimes held far from the country. Former\u00a0militia leader Roger Lumbala, for example, is soon to\u00a0be tried under the “universal jurisdiction” of French\u00a0courts for his responsibility in the 2002-2003 deadly\u00a0\u201cEffacer le tableau\u201d campaign in eastern DRC. We\u00a0intend to work closely with the international and\u00a0national media to enable the Congolese people –\u00a0especially indigenous populations like the pygmies of\u00a0the Ituri district who were particularly affected by\u00a0these atrocities – to follow this trial and be informed\u00a0about crimes that have never been officially recognised in the DRC.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

This interview is taken from our 12th publication “Mediation” entitled “Making sense of international and transitional justice”, available at this link<\/a>.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Daniele Perissi heads the Great Lakes\u00a0programme of Swiss NGO TRIAL\u00a0International, which helps victims of\u00a0international crimes obtain justice. He\u00a0explains how international justice and its\u00a0relationship with the media are being reinvented in DR Congo. With the ICTR (International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda) and the International Criminal\u00a0Court\u2019s (ICC) investigations in DR Congo, the Great\u00a0Lakes is a region where […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":2736,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[196],"tags":[239,303],"class_list":["post-2047","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-our-news","tag-how-we-work-information-dialogue","tag-expertise-justice-and-reconciliation"],"acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-04-23 05:24:14","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hirondelle.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2047","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hirondelle.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hirondelle.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hirondelle.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hirondelle.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2047"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.hirondelle.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2047\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hirondelle.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2736"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hirondelle.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2047"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hirondelle.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2047"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hirondelle.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2047"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}