Lord’s Resistance Army

Lord Parekh Excerpts

Monday 26th March 2012 Grand Committee

[Lord Parekh]

My Lords, I begin by thanking the noble Lord, Lord Alton of Liverpool, for securing this debate and for introducing it with such passion and understanding. The crimes of the LRA and Joseph Kony are horrendous and well known. Atrocities against civilians have been considerable, and children have been used as soldiers and sex slaves. They have also been turned into drug addicts so that even when they stop being soldiers they remain condemned to a certain kind of life all their lives.

Arrest warrants have been issued by the ICC since 2005 and very little has happened. There is no doubt in anybody’s mind that Kony and his cronies must be brought to justice, but I want to approach the question from a slightly different angle. What would happen if they were arrested and brought before the ICC? The trial would drag on; evidence would be degraded by the time of the trial, as has happened in several other cases before the ICC; or the evidence would fail to measure up to the very high standards required by the ICC for evidential justification. There would be considerable costs involved and the world would eventually lose interest in the trial and what the LRA had been doing. Painful memories of the victims would be revived and, within the countries involved, permanent problems that gave rise to the LRA and other things would remain unresolved.

While I agree entirely that we ought to be doing everything within our power to arrest Joseph Kony and others, we should be paying attention to two important things that are in danger of being neglected. First, we should be looking very carefully at the ICC. It demands standards of proof which are too high. In its conception, it has been modelled on domestic courts of justice and tribunals. That does not work at the international level. It also tends to be heavily cumbersome and dilatory. Proceedings of domestic courts cannot, as I said earlier, be models for what goes on at the international level. Again, the ICC is concerned not with ordinary crimes of rape, burglary and murder, as domestic courts are, but with multiple atrocities. How are cases involving multiple atrocities, in a context where the international law is not entirely clear, to be dealt with? It is also important that the judges should have some experience of dealing with cases involving multiple atrocities of this kind. So we should reflect a little more carefully than we have done so far upon the way in which the ICC has proceeded. It is dilatory and enormously costly. Judgment does not come until quite a few years later, and, more importantly, memories get revived when victims would rather forget.

The second important question we should be looking at is this: justice is absolutely important, but peace and domestic reconciliation are equally important. Once upon a time, the LRA had domestic support and was funded. The question that we should therefore be asking is: how can we create a situation in which domestic issues can be satisfactorily resolved before they get out of control or are hijacked in the way in which the LRA and Joseph Kony have hijacked such issues? It is also important, as many people have pointed out, that we should be looking not merely to the ICC to provide an answer, but also to domestic justice mechanisms. For example, in the Acholi tribe in Uganda, to which Kony belongs, there is a very conventional way of dealing with situations of this kind, which is called mato oput. It involves admission of guilt, asking for forgiveness and paying compensation. This is not enough, because things will go wrong, but nevertheless it provides one important way in which a traditional society is able to deal with crimes of this kind. While the ICC is necessary, we ought also to try to integrate traditional mechanisms of justice, restoration and reconciliation into the ICC procedure.