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Abstract:
The International Criminal Court (ICC) is the first international criminal tribunal to explicitly codify the mental incapacity defence in its statute. The recent case against Dominic Ongwen, a former child soldier and high-ranking commander in the insurgent group “Lord’s Resistance Army,” offered ICC the first opportunity to define and apply the preconditions for a defence in practice. As this article shows, despite the novelty of this recent development, there is a pattern in how the international criminal tribunals have been treating the plausibility of mental health defences since WWII which extends to ICC. The article concludes by considering the implications of the Ongwen case for future ICC jurisprudence.
