Wartime Forced Marriage and Sexual Slavery in Africa

On 8 July 2005, the ICC prosecutor officially issued arrest warrants for Joseph Kony, the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) leader and his top four allies/commanders for war crimes and crimes against humanity. On 6 December 2016, Trial Chamber IX of the ICC commenced its trial against Dominic Ongwen, one of the five LRA commanders indicted. Presently, the other three are dead, and only Kony is at large. Ongwen was accused of 70 counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity. On 4 February 2021, Trial Chamber IX found Ongwen guilty of all 19 counts of sexual and gender-based violence charges, including sexual slavery, forced marriage, rape, enslavement and forced pregnancy.  The trial was the first in which the ICC convicted a rebel commander for forced pregnancy as a war crime and a crime against humanity. It was also the first time that the ICC convicted forced marriage (charged under the category of ‘other inhumane acts’), constituting a crime against humanity.

The debate in research is whether these wartime practices should be interpreted as constituting modern slavery or different phenomena. Slavery remains a legal concept, with the 1926 Slavery Convention defining it as ‘the status or condition of a person over whom any or all of the powers attaching to the right of ownership are exercised.’