Prosecutors have called for a life sentence for a Sudanese militia leader convicted of committing crimes against humanity during the East African country’s previous civil war more than two decades ago.
The International Criminal Court (ICC) opened a sentencing hearing for Ali Muhammad Ali Abd-Al-Rahman (also known as Ali Kushayb) on Tuesday.
The previous day, prosecutor Julian Nicholls had demanded the maximum penalty for the “enthusiastic, energetic and effective perpetrator of abuses carried out in the western Darfur region”.
Prosecutors say that among his crimes, Abd-Al-Rahman killed two people with an axe.
“You literally have an axe murderer before you,” Nicholls told the judges in The Hague, as Abd-Al-Rahman looked on. “Only a life sentence will serve the interest of retribution and deterrence.”
Abd-Al-Rahman’s defence lawyers, who are asking for a seven-year jail term, will present their case during Tuesday and Wednesday’s hearings.
Last month, Abd-Al-Rahman was convicted of 27 counts, including mass murders and rapes, for leading government-backed Janjaweed militia forces in the Darfur region in western Sudan on a campaign of killing and destruction from 2003 to 2004.
It was the first time the ICC had convicted a suspect of crimes in Darfur, a region that is once again seeing mass atrocities amid a vicious civil war.
Wrong man
Abd-Al-Rahman has consistently denied being a high-ranking official in the Janjaweed militia, a largely Arab paramilitary force armed by the Sudanese government to kill mainly Black African tribes in Darfur.
He has insisted since the opening of his trial in April 2022 that he is “not Ali Kushayb” and that the court has got the wrong man – an argument rejected by the judges.
Abd-Al-Rahman fled to the Central African Republic in February 2020 when a new Sudanese government announced its intention to cooperate with the ICC’s investigation.
He said he then handed himself in because he was “desperate” and feared authorities would kill him.
Fighting broke out in Sudan’s Darfur region when non-Arab tribes, complaining of systematic discrimination, took up arms against the Arab-dominated government.
Khartoum responded by unleashing the Janjaweed, a force now known as the Popular Defence Forces and drawn from among the region’s nomadic tribes.
The United Nations says 300,000 people were killed and 2.5 million more were displaced in the Darfur conflict in the 2000s.
ICC prosecutors are hoping to issue more arrest warrants related to the current crisis in Sudan.
Tens of thousands have been killed and millions displaced in the war between the government-linked Sudanese army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), which traces its origins back to the Janjaweed militia.
The conflict, marked by claims of atrocities on all sides, has created the “worst humanitarian crisis in the world”, according to the African Union.
At least 40,000 people have been killed, according to the World Health Organization, and 12 million others displaced.
