ICC sentences former Congo VP Bemba to 18 years in prison

Bemba’s lawyers, for their part, had called for him to be released, pointing out that he had already spent eight years in jail before and during his trial. He is also the first to be held directly responsible for his subordinates’ actions; his 1,500 troops engaged in a wide-scale rampage in the vehicle for a five-month period, and ICC judges said Bemba could have stopped the violence but chose not to.

In 2002 Bemba had sent more than 1,000 fighters to the auto to help then president Ange Felix Patasse put down an attempted coup.

They unleashed a five-month campaign of terror aimed at squashing any resistance to Patasse’s rule.

Some victims were raped repeatedly by as many as 20 soldiers, others were shot point blank for refusing to hand over a motorbike or a sheep.

Bemba was “extremely disappointed” with the sentence, his lawyer, Kate Gibson, told AFP news agency. He is able to appeal his conviction and sentence.

Bemba is the highest-ranking official so far to be convicted by the ICC, which was set up in 2002 as the world’s only permanent war crimes court.

All will be served concurrently.

Presiding Judge Sylvia Steiner announced the sentencing Tuesday in a ruling read to the court.

Bensouda said she and her team would study the sentence before deciding whether to appeal.

The jail term was “dramatically outside the sentences that have been given to commanders before the other courts and tribunals”, she said.

“After the attacks, some parents found their daughters lying on the ground crying and bleeding from their vaginas”, Steiner said, describing as an aggravating circumstance the fact that victims had been “particularly defenceless”.

The conviction was the ICC’s first verdict to recognise rape as a weapon of war and to employ the doctrine of command responsibility: that leaders are accountable for the crimes of their subordinates, the group said.

Sexual crimes However, as the hearing ended, ICC chief prosecutor Fatou Bensouda described the verdict as “a very important day for global criminal justice, especially when it comes to sexual and gender-based crimes”.

An alliance of rights groups, FIDH, said: “The ICC has finally spoken, loud and clear: Sexual violence in armed conflict can not go unpunished”.

Originally a rebel force in Congo’s northwest, the MLC is now CAR’s second-largest opposition party.

Jean-Pierre Bemba enters the court room of the International Criminal Court in The Hague, Netherlands, Tuesday, June 21, 2016.

The International Criminal Court (ICC) delivered a landmark sentence today, condemning Jean-Pierre Bemba to 18 years in prison for rape, murder and pillage committed by his troops in the Central African Republic in 2002 and 2003.