His legal professionals raised 90 grounds for the enchantment, alleging authorized, procedural and factual errors within the conviction and sentence.
In the primary a part of a listening to Thursday, the appeals judges upheld all of Ongwen’s convictions.
“The appeals chamber rejects all the defense’s grounds of appeal and confirms unanimously the conviction decision,” Presiding Judge Luz del Carmen Ibáñez Carranza mentioned.
She was on account of ship the appeals chamber’s choice on Ongwen’s enchantment in opposition to his sentence later within the day.
Ongwen sat in court docket listening intently to the ruling by a headset.
Ongwen was himself kidnapped by the shadowy militia as a 9-year-old boy and remodeled right into a ruthless baby soldier. At trial, his protection legal professionals mentioned his abduction and indoctrination within the LRA made Ongwen a “victim and not a victim and perpetrator at the same time.”
The appeals chamber rejected arguments that he was mentally unfit to be convicted and that he was beneath duress on the time of his offenses.
The Lord’s Resistance Army was fashioned by its chief, Joseph Kony, as an anti-government insurgent pressure in Uganda. It was accused of widespread atrocities, together with mass killings, mutilations, recruiting and utilizing baby troopers, and preserving women as intercourse slaves.
A army marketing campaign compelled the LRA out of Uganda in 2005, scattering its members throughout central Africa. Reports over time have claimed that Kony was hiding in Sudan’s Darfur area or in a distant nook of Central African Republic, the place LRA fighters continued to kill and abduct folks throughout occasional village raids, and the place Ongwen was arrested in 2015.
Kony, who’s a fugitive from the International Criminal Court, turned internationally infamous in 2012 when the U.S.-based advocacy group Invisible Children made a viral video highlighting the LRA’s crimes.
