THE HAGUE, Netherlands (CN) — Facing 13 counts of crimes against humanity, Al Hassan Ag Abdoul Aziz Ag Mohamed Ag Mahmoud began trial Tuesday on charges that, as the head of the Islamic police force in the ancient city of Timbuktu, he forced women to wear headscarves, sold them into sexual slavery and tortured anyone who refused to comply.
Large parts of Mali fell to Islamic separatist groups following a 2012 coup. Before a French-led military forced them out in 2013, they enforced strict religious rules on the population.
“Women could no longer go about their normal activities for fear of being tortured,” Seydou Doumbia, one of the two legal representatives of victims said in his opening statement.
There are 1,946 confirmed victims in the case, and their legal representatives intend to put 52 witnesses on the stand in the coming weeks in an effort to show how difficult life was during the 10-month occupation. Al Hassan, wearing a blue shirt and covering his head and most of his face with a beige veil known as a tagelmust, looked bored during Tuesday's proceedings.
Prosecutors claim that the 45-year-old Al Hassan was a senior member of Ansar Dine, an Islamic extremist group with links to al-Qaida.
When his trial opened in 2020 at the world’s only permanent court for atrocity crimes, it took prosecutors 45 minutes to read out the extensive list of charges against him. The court announced in 2019 it would move forward with charges, following a week of hearings into whether prosecutors had sufficient evidence to do so.
Al Hassan is the second person to be charged with crimes relating to the conflict in Mali and the first defendant before the court where gender-based violence undergirds the bulk of his charges.
Ahmad al-Faqi al-Mahdi was sentenced to nine years in prison in 2016 for destroying religious monuments in Mali. Former Congolese warlord Bosco Ntaganda was convicted of rape and sexual slavery in 2019, but most of his 18 charges focused on other war crimes, including murder, torture and the conscription of child soldiers. The ex-vice president of the Democratic Republic of Congo, Jean-Pierre Bemba, was also convicted of rape but his conviction was overturned on appeal.
Malian authorities handed Al Hassan over to the ICC in 2018. The defense will present its case later this year. So far they have fought to exclude interviews their client gave to ICC investigators, saying they occurred while he was being tortured in Malian police custody.
The Hague-based court was established by the Rome Statute in 2002 to prosecute genocide and crimes against humanity that take place in a member state or are committed by a member state. It can also take up a case that is referred to it by the United Nations Security Council.
the International Criminal Court on Tuesday, in the first trial where gender-based crimes have played a prominent role.
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