I am thrilled to announce the publication of my book, Race, Culture and Mental Illness in the International Criminal Court’s Ongwen Judgment: Biases and Blindspots, Palgrave/Macmillan (2024). I am one of Mr. Dominic Ongwen’s defence counsel. Chief Charles A. Taku, Lead Counsel in Ongwen, contributed the Introduction to the book. The book is available as an e-book and in hardcover on the publisher’s website, as well as on Amazon and other sites.

Dominic Ongwen, an Acholi, was abducted in 1987, at the age of 8 or 9 years old, by the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) in Northern Uganda. He made multiple attempts to escape (for which he was punished by imprisonment in the LRA), but only succeeded in late 2014. In January 2015, he surrendered on the ICC’s arrest warrant in Central African Republic and was transferred to the Hague for trial. He was prosecuted on an ICC indictment of 70 charges; these included war crimes; crimes against humanity, such as sexual and gender-based crimes; and conscripting child soldiers (like himself). In February 2021, the ICC’s Trial Chamber IX convicted Mr. Ongwen of 61 charges and two modes of liability and he was sentenced to a prison term of 25 years. The Appeals Chamber affirmed the Trial Judgment’s convictions and sentence in December 2022.

Anyone involved in international criminal law is likely familiar with the Ongwen case: it is a case of many “firsts:” the first ICC prosecution of a mentally ill and mentally disabled defendant who asserted the affirmative defences of mental disease or defect, and duress under the ICC’s Rome Statute, Article 31(1)(a) and (d) (grounds for excluding criminal responsibility) as complete defences; the first case in which culture and spiritualism played a prominent role in the Defence; the first ICC prosecution of a defendant for crimes for which he is also a victim; and, to date, the longest Confirmation of Charges (COC) decision charging a single defendant, and the longest single defendant Trial Judgment at the ICC.

There is no dearth of written material available on the Ongwen case and, more generally, the impact of race and culture, as well as disability, on international justice and the structural components of the ICC. However, this book presents a different aspect: it examines how the ICC’s default settings of white supremacy, racism, culturalism and lack of access to justice for the disabled impacted its jurisprudence in the Ongwen case. To this end, the text references Court decisions, trial transcripts and pleadings, and includes extensive footnotes with source material from other experts on child soldiers, mental illness, culture, spiritualism, racism, white supremacy, confirmation bias, affirmative defences, reasonable accommodation, and related topics.

Chapter 1 demonstrates how the Ongwen Trial Chamber’s biases and blindspots in respect to race and culture impacted its jurisprudence, resulting in its rejection of the mental illness and duress affirmative defences and any relevance of, and role for Acholi traditional justice in its sentencing. In 2023, I posted an abstract from a paper on my INTLAWGRRLS Blog, which I later edited and augmented for Chapter 1 of the book. Chapter 2 focuses on the Trial Chamber’s failure to reasonably accommodate Mr. Ongwen, a mentally disabled defendant and provide equal access to justice for him, resulting in a violation of his fair trial rights. The examples in the book of the intersection of language, culture and race are highlighted in a recently published piece in the March 2025 Spotlight, Language, Culture and Justice Hub at https://lcjh.bard.edu/march-2025-race-culture-and-mental-illness-in-the-international-criminal-courts-ongwen-judgment-biases-and-blindspots/.

Please send me your comments, if you have an opportunity to read the book or are using the Ongwen case in your academic work or litigation. My e-mail is bethlyons@aol.com. My website is bethslyons.com. Thanks.