The Qualification of a Protected Indigenous Group Under the Rome Statute: The Case of the Hunde People Facing Mass Crimes in Eastern DRC

This study analyzes the legal protection of the Hunde people, an indigenous community in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo, through the lens of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. Although this population is the target of systematic violence in the territories of Rutshuru, Masisi, and Goma, these crimes are often categorized merely as collateral war damage, thereby obscuring their identity-based and land-related dimensions. The Hunde fulfill the criteria of a "protected group" (ethnic and cultural) as defined by international jurisprudence. This research highlights a mechanism of "human persecution and land spoliation": the massacres, the assassinations of customary chiefs (Mwami), and forced displacements are not isolated acts, but rather a deliberate strategy of ethnic cleansing aimed at creating a legal vacuum to facilitate the plunder of the ancestral lands of the Hunde tribe. This research critiques the shortcomings of the current justice system, which is overly focused on individual criminal responsibility, and argues for a paradigm shift. It proposes a model of restorative social justice where the redress of damages would no longer be solely financial, but would imperatively involve the restitution of land and the rehabilitation of customary structures weakened by political maneuvers and politico-military movements. The formal recognition of protected group status is presented as the sole legal safeguard capable of preventing the social and cultural ethnocide of the Hunde in the face of cycles of violence and land dispossession targeting the Hunde tribe in the DRC.