Trials of international war crimes, various tasks and demands for the inclusion of other accused

In recent years, leaders from several countries have been tried by the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague or by special war crimes and crimes against humanity courts. These trials have either ended in convictions or acquittals, and some have not been brought to the courts.

The continent had the largest share of actual prosecutions and arrest warrants against former senior leaders and leaders who were still in office when they were tried or sentenced.

On Tuesday, former president Laurent Gbagbo, 73, was acquitted of crimes against humanity during the post-election unrest in 2010 and 2011 and ended with the arrest of Hassan and Tara with the support of French and UN troops stationed there.

The verdict that Gbagbo has acquitted has been a setback for the International Criminal Court since he is the third acquittal in just four years.

Charges fall off
French and international forces arrested Gbagbo in late 2011 and handed him over to the Criminal Court, which was set up in 2002 to try war criminals.

Gbagbo, who has since been jailed in The Hague, was the first former head of state to appear before the International Criminal Court. The judges said the prosecution failed to prove the charges against the former president and his close ally, Charles Pelle Judet, and ordered their release, while prosecutors said he reserved the right to appeal. .

In 2014, the ICC prosecutor dropped five charges of crimes against humanity against Kenyan President Ohoro Kenyatta for lack of evidence. The charges relate to bloody election-related violence in 2007 and 2008, and he was appointed deputy prime minister.

Kenyatta was elected president for the first time in 2013 before being re-elected in 2017 in a ballot marred by accusations of fraud and violence.

Last year, the Appeals Chamber of the Criminal Court issued a judgment dismissing Jean-Pierre Bemba, former Vice President of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, on charges of committing war crimes and crimes against humanity by his militia in the Central African Republic between 2002 and 2003.

Conviction and imprisonment
It was a different matter for Chad's former president Hissène Habré, who was tried by a special tribunal set up by the African Union on charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity during his 1982-90 reign, in which 40,000 people were killed, according to international human rights groups.

The court was held in 2015 in Senegal. The following year, Habré was sentenced to life imprisonment, which refused to recognize the legality of the court.

Several years earlier - in 2002 - the trial of former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic began before a war crimes tribunal in The Hague to look into crimes committed during the Yugoslav war of the 1990s.

Milosevic was charged with dozens of charges of war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide. The trial continued until his death in March 2006, and he was pleaded not guilty.

In the following years, many war crimes suspects from Serb and Croat leaders appeared before the court. Among them was Radovan Karadzic, a Bosnian Serb who was sentenced in 2016 to 40 years in prison. In late 2017, the Bosnian Serb military commander General Slobodan Beralik was sentenced to 20 years in prison and, after the sentence was pronounced, Baralik threw poison from a bottle pulled from his pocket to die within minutes.

Criminal Challenge
In 2009 and 2010, the ICC issued two warrants for the arrest of Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir on charges of crimes against humanity including genocide, murder and forced displacement, and war crimes also genocide and attacks on civilians, the first time such action was taken against a president still in office.

The charges relate to the conflict that erupted in the Darfur region of western Sudan, which the United Nations says has killed 300,000 people, while Khartoum asserts that the number of victims has not exceeded 10,000.

But Bashir has since defied the court, which has been unable to execute the arrest warrant despite repeated demands that the Sudanese president be arrested during his visit to the signatories to the Rome Convention establishing international criminality. Bashir and Sudanese officials continued to accuse the ICC of being politicized.

The court was also unable to implement Saif al-Islam Gaddafi's arrest warrant in June 2011, a few months after the revolution against his father's late regime, Muammar Gaddafi, on charges of war crimes, despite repeated calls to the Libyan authorities and the international community.

Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda confirmed last year that Saif al-Islam had challenged the court's request to extradite her. The appeal was filed after a Libyan battalion released Gaddafi's son after six years in mysterious custody in the city of Zintan (south-west of Tripoli).

In addition to Saif, there is the officer Mahmud al-Urfali loyal to the retired Libyan brigade Khalifa Hafer, who issued the first international arrest warrant for him in 2017 after the publication of his recordings, the execution of dozens of people in Benghazi, eastern Libya, and although a long time to the first note, For his extradition to the Court.

Syria and Myanmar
With Russia vetoing the UN Security Council, all attempts to refer Syria to the International Criminal Court to try those responsible for war crimes in its territory since 2011 have failed.

Over the past years, Western politicians, Syrian dissidents and international human rights organizations have called for the trial of President Bashar al-Asad as the primary responsible for war crimes and crimes against humanity committed in Syria, but the political and legal complexities surrounding the Syrian crisis seem to weaken the possibility.

The same vote was raised last year for Myanmar leaders to be tried on the same charges in connection with the crackdown on the Muslim Rohingya minority and led to more than half a million people fleeing to neighboring Bangladesh.