The Hague, Netherlands | AFP | The International Criminal Court Friday ordered 297 victims of ex-Congolese warlord Germain Katanga to each be paid “a symbolic” $250 in damages for a brutal 2003 attack on their village, in the tribunal’s first such award. Awarding both individual and collective damages, the court also found that Katanga was liable for $1-million of the total material, psychological and physical damage caused, estimated by the court to stand at $3.7-million. Mr. Katanga, convicted of war crimes in 2014 for supplying the weapons and commanding the militia that led the assault on Bogoro village in 2003, is currently in prison in the Democratic Republic of the Congo on other criminal charges and is considered penniless. Presiding Judge Marc Perrin de Brichambaut, Judge Olga Herrera-Carbuccia, and Judge Peter Kovacs in the courtroom of the International Criminal Court, as the ICC delivers its order for reparations to victims in the case The Prosecutor v. Germain Katanga at a public hearing, in The Hague, Netherlands March 24, 2017. “This symbolic amount, while not intended to compensate for the entirety of the harm, does provide meaningful relief to the victims for the harm they have suffered,” the court said. Because the perpetrator has no money, the compensation will instead be provided by the Trust Fund for Victims, an independent body established under the court’s founding rules and financed by voluntary contributions from the court’s member states.
Imprisoned former Congolese warlord Germain Katanga is ordered by the International Criminal Court to pay reparations to some of his victims in the first such ruling by the court.