By Ephraim Agbo
On 6 October 2025 the International Criminal Court (ICC) convicted Ali Muhammad Ali Abd-al-Rahman — commonly called Ali Kushayb — on 27 counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity for his role in the Darfur campaign of 2003–2004. The conviction is neither a final chapter nor a miracle cure; it is a legally significant event that illuminates the strengths and the structural weaknesses of international criminal justice, and it raises urgent questions about prevention, reparations, and political reform in Sudan.
Below I move beyond description: I analyse how this case was won, why it matters, what it failed to deliver, and the concrete policy and justice steps that logically follow.
How the prosecution won — a model of evidentiary and strategic focus
Two complementary strategies underpinned the conviction:
Micro-forensics anchored in survivor testimony. Prosecutors tied named incidents — attacks on specific villages, documented massacres and rapes — to Kushayb through eyewitnesses, contemporaneous incident records, and incident-level corroboration. This granular approach matters because it reduces the reasonable-doubt gap created when cases rely only on high-level patterns.
Contextualisation through expert evidence. The court used joint and expert testimony to show that the attacks were not isolated crimes of opportunity but part of a coordinated campaign: that the Janjaweed model operated as an instrument of state policy in those years and that Kushayb occupied a role that could translate into criminal responsibility under command-and-control doctrines. Experts (including those from institutions like the World Peace Foundation) provided the scaffolding that allowed judges to read incident evidence as components of an organised criminal enterprise.
This two-track strategy—specific incidents + structural context—is the most reliable path to conviction in mass-violence cases where direct documentary “smoking guns” are rare.
The legal reasoning and its limits
Command responsibility vs. direct perpetration. The court’s findings depended on establishing that Kushayb had effective control over forces or participated in a collective criminal design — not that he personally carried out every crime. That doctrinal move is appropriate: modern atrocity prosecutions must translate dispersed violence into individual legal liability. But it also tightens the evidentiary bar: prosecutors must show patterns of orders, public presence at attacks, or other indicia of control. The Kushayb case shows that the bar can be met — but only with exhaustive documentation and credible witnesses.
Evidentiary fragility. Reliance on eyewitness testimony creates vulnerability to defence attacks (memory, bias, identifications), and witness protection and fragmentation of records over 20 years complicate corroboration. The prosecution’s success reflects exceptionalinvestigative persistence and the rare circumstance that Kushayb was physically in custody and available for trial. That reality underwrites a sobering corollary: without custody, even excellent cases remain hypothetical.
Political context: surrender, cooperation, and selective enforcement
Kushayb’s transfer to The Hague followed the political opening after Sudan’s 2019 change in government and subsequent signals of cooperation with the ICC. That transfer was decisive: the ICC cannot act without a suspect in custody. But the broader political environment is harsher to critics: many higher-level suspects (including those at the very top of political hierarchies) remain at large or protected by patronage networks. The result is selective enforcement driven less by legal merit than by geopolitics and state cooperation.
This selectivity undermines two critical instruments of international justice: deterrence and equal accountability. If only those who surrender or fall into hands of cooperative states are tried, the normative deterrent value of prosecutions is attenuated.
The displacement between criminal law and victims’ needs
Criminal convictions produce official findings and can punish individuals. They do not automatically deliver the bulk of what survivors say they need: security, return of property, dignified reparations, community reconstruction, and healing. Darfur’s estimated toll — around 300,000 deaths and millions displaced in the 2000s — makes that mismatch stark: a single conviction does not reconstitute ruined livelihoods or undo demographic devastation. The court’s judgment helps with recognition and historical record, but it is a first step in a longer transitional justice journey.
Why the verdict is strategically important anyway
Despite limits, the conviction matters in four concrete ways:
- It creates an authoritative written record that rebuts denial and underpins reparations claims and memorialisation projects. International judgments are evidence in future civil and administrative fora.
- It refines prosecutorial playbooks — showing how to combine incident-level documentation with contextual experts to prove command responsibility. Other prosecutors will copy and adapt these tactics.
- It raises political costs for some actors and states that openly protect indicted individuals; over time, the reputational and financial consequences (sanctions, diplomatic pressure) can constrain patronage networks. Amnesty and other rights groups framed the verdict as a potential warning for current abusers.
- It strengthens civil society advocacy by validating survivor testimony and creating a legal record that activists can use to press for domestic reforms and reparations.
The present threat: continuity between Janjaweed and the RSF
The political-military networks that produced Darfur’s early atrocities did not evaporate. The Janjaweed’s organisational lineage to today’s Rapid Support Forces (RSF) shows institutional continuity: ex-militia leaders, paramilitary structures, and patterns of impunity were transformed — and in some cases institutionalised — into new power-centres. The RSF’s role in Sudan’s current civil conflict (since April 2023) and allegations of fresh mass abuses demonstrate that prosecutions against individuals will not by themselves dismantle the systems that reproduce atrocity.
Policy prescriptions — what should change now
If the goal is to convert a single conviction into a durable reduction of atrocity risk and a credible justice process for victims, policymakers and advocates should pursue a multipronged strategy:
A. Arrest and cooperation diplomacy. Targeted diplomacy to secure transfers of other indicted individuals (where evidence is sufficient), combined with conditional incentives (aid, visas, sanctions relief) tied to cooperation with the ICC. Without arrests, the court’s docket will remain symbolic.
B. Parallel domestic accountability and reform. Support Sudanese judiciary capacity, vet and reform security institutions (including DDR — disarmament, demobilisation, reintegration — tailored to paramilitary actors), and create domestic mechanisms that approximate international standards of fairness and independence. Complementarity is not optional.
C. Victim-centred reparations and reconstruction. Begin planning and financing community-level reparations (cash, land restitution, infrastructure) and psychosocial care — programmes that courts alone do not provide. The ICC can order reparations, but execution usually requires national or donor support.
D. Documentation & safe testimony pipelines. Invest in survivor documentation, mobile evidence collection, satellite imagery analysis, and secure chains of custody, so future cases are ready if and when suspects are arrested. The Kushayb prosecution succeeded in part because evidence was preserved; scale this model.
E. Regional pressure to break protectors’ networks. Engage neighbours and regional powers to deny sanctuary, clamp down on illicit finance, and refuse safe haven to indicted figures. Coercive regional diplomacy is often the only practicable enforcement lever.
Key questions and political risks to watch
- Does conviction of low- or mid-level commanders produce deterrence or merely decapitation that invites fragmentation and more criminal entrepreneurs? The empirical answer may vary; Sudan’s current instability suggests risks of fragmentation.
- How will the RSF and its sponsors react politically to a growing ICC docket? Expect rhetorical denial, domestic nationalist framing, and potential recrudescence of violence if leaders feel cornered.
- Can hybrid accountability mechanisms (local courts + international advisers) reconcile demands for speed and legitimacy? That model deserves pilots.
Final take — what the conviction buys us, and what it doesn’t
Ali Kushayb’s conviction is an overdue and important piece of accountability. Legally, it demonstrates that painstaking documentation and smart use of expert context can secure convictions in complex mass-violence cases. Politically, it offers a lever for advocates. But justice in Darfur will not be delivered by a single verdict; it requires arrests of other suspects, domestic reforms, funded reparations, and meaningful security guarantees for communities. Most importantly, preventing future atrocity requires breaking the political and economic networks that created the Janjaweed-to-RSF trajectory — a task that is primarily political and institutional, not judicial.
The ICC verdict is necessary. It is not sufficient.
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