The International Criminal Court (ICC) has ratified the death of Sylvestre Mudacumura, the top military commander of the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR), and has consequently decided to set aside the arrest warrant that had been in effect against him for more than ten years for war crimes committed in 2009 and 2010 in the east of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).
The court has resolved to terminate the case against the commander at the instigation of the Office of the Prosecutor and "after receiving notification of his death".
So it has detailed in a note made public this Thursday, in which it stresses that its "jurisdiction cannot be exercised over a deceased person" and that this decision means that "pending cooperation requests related to this proceeding are no longer valid".
The ICC has "concluded that there is no evidence that Mudacumura is still alive", after analyzing the documentation submitted by the Secretariat and the Office of the Prosecutor about his death during an operation by the Congolese Army "on 17 September 2019 or around that date, including reports from open sources and public statements".
In July 2021, the ICC Office of the Prosecutor issued an arrest warrant against Mudacumura for nine alleged war crimes "allegedly" committed between January 2009 and September 2010 in the provinces of North Kivu and South Kivu, in eastern DRC.
Specifically, the ICC recalls, the supreme commander of the FDLR faced charges for "attacks against civilians, murder, mutilation, cruel treatment, rape, torture, destruction of property, pillaging, and attacks against personal dignity".
The FDLR emerged in the year 2000, made up of Hutu refugees and Rwandan militiamen who fled after their involvement in the 1994 genocide, until finally settling in territory of the Democratic Republic of the Congo.