The judges of the International Criminal Court in the Hague on Thursday rejected Ugandan warlord Dominic Ongwen’s appeal of his 2021 conviction on 61 counts of offenses including murders, rapes, forced marriages, and recruiting child soldiers during a 2002-2005 war crime spree, the AP reports.
Ongwen’s lawyers had argued their client was mentally unfit to be convicted as he was really stressed out and under a lot of pressure to deliver results for Lord’s Resistance Army leader Joseph Kony’s insurgency to overthrow the Ugandan government and establish a Christian theocracy at the time of the war crimes, adding that Ongwen was pressed into child soldiering himself at age 9.
Presiding Judge Luz del Carmen Ibáñez Carranza didn’t buy it, and ruling that the “appeals chamber rejects all the defense’s grounds of appeal and confirms unanimously the conviction decision.” The same judge will also issue a ruling on Ongwen’s appeal of his 25 year sentence later Thursday.