Constructing a Sensory Alternative to the Ongwen Judgment

Much ink has been spilt criticising the ICC’s Ongwen trial judgment for its failure to grasp the cultural context in which the accused Ongwen and the Acholi community were embedded. Some scholars blame this on the poor quality of translation services, others attribute it to the ‘binarism’ of judgments. We offer another explanation for the Ongwen judgment’s deficiencies: its purely textual format. The judgment shows that the continued preference for textual judgments in international criminal law sterilises victims’ experiences, decontextualises evidence, and muffles objectivity. This ties into the historical preference for text over senses, a colonially engineered decision aimed at suppressing non-Western epistemologies. In this paper, we call for the international criminal law judgment to embrace ‘the opportunities of the wider sensory field’. Drawing on the pervasive sensory dimensions of international criminal law, we argue that a sensory reimagination of judgments would better serve international criminal law’s affective potential by empowering survivors and achieving a more reparative and reconstructive justice.