DR Congo military court sentences 66 soldiers to death after mutiny near front line with M23

A military court sitting in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo has sentenced 66 soldiers to death, the latest and largest in a string of mass capital verdicts against government troops accused of mutiny, disobedience and cowardice during the war against the Rwanda-backed M23 rebel coalition.

The verdicts, reported by local and regional outlets over the weekend, were handed down late on Friday by the Goma garrison military court, which had been sitting on a special circuit in Walikale territory, North Kivu province, since late October. The defendants belonged to the Congolese army's 3415th Infantry Regiment, a unit that has been fighting the Alliance Fleuve Congo/M23 coalition and allied armed groups in one of the most contested corners of the country's long-running eastern conflict.

Walikale itself has changed hands during that conflict. M23 fighters broke through Congolese army lines and seized the territory's main town in March 2025, part of a broader offensive that also brought the regional capitals Goma and Bukavu under rebel control before a fragile, repeatedly violated ceasefire took hold. The territory, the largest in North Kivu by land area, is also one of its richest in cassiterite, the tin ore that has long helped finance armed groups on both sides of the conflict. Civilians there have endured repeated waves of displacement, and aid groups have described the area's sole referral hospital as overwhelmed even before the latest trial began.

A fast-moving case

The case began with 54 soldiers and expanded quickly. According to Radio Okapi, the Kinshasa station run jointly with the United Nations mission in the country, 16 additional soldiers from the same regiment were referred to the court on November 2, bringing the total number of defendants to 71. The trial itself had opened on October 26, six days after the men were arrested in the Ngora area of the Waloa-Loanda grouping, where fighting on October 16 and 20 left two soldiers and a civilian dead.

Of the 71 defendants, local reports carried by regional outlets say 66 were convicted and sentenced to death, four were acquitted, including the regiment's intelligence officer, and one soldier received a ten-year prison term after the court recognized mitigating circumstances. A slightly different tally, giving 65 death sentences rather than 66, has circulated in some accounts, and the discrepancy had not been resolved as of this weekend. The charges spanned military revolt, refusal to obey orders, cowardice in the face of the enemy and the wasting of war munitions; the original case against the first 54 defendants also included murder counts tied to the October shootings. According to one account of the verdict, the army described the fast-tracked trial as an effort to tighten discipline within the ranks.

A reinstated death penalty

The Walikale case is the latest application of a policy the Congolese government adopted in March 2024, when the Ministry of Justice issued a circular lifting a moratorium on executions that had held since 2003. Capital punishment was never abolished in Congolese law; officials framed the reversal as a response to treason, espionage and "cowardice" linked to the war against M23, and said it was meant to apply chiefly to members of the security forces and those accused of collaborating with the rebels.

The Walikale verdict fits a now-familiar pattern. A military court in Butembo sentenced 25 soldiers to death in July 2024 for fleeing fighting with M23, and a court in Uvira sentenced 27 soldiers to death for cowardice as recently as October of this year. In September 2025, a military court sentenced former president Joseph Kabila to death in absentia on charges of treason and war crimes.

"I find them guilty and sentence each of them to death," the presiding judge in the 2024 Butembo case, Colonel Kabeya Ya Hanu, told the court as he read that earlier verdict, illustrating the blunt language Congolese military courts have used in applying the reinstated penalty.

Taken together, the cases reflect how far military courts have expanded their use of capital punishment since the moratorium was lifted, even as the conflict in the east has displaced millions of people and stretched an army that officers and independent analysts have repeatedly described as disorganized, poorly supplied and short of experienced commanders.

Those strains fall most directly on rank-and-file soldiers like the men convicted in Walikale, many of whom were deployed to a territory that M23 fighters seized outright in March 2025 and have continued to contest since. Families of the convicted men, residents of Ngora and the surrounding Waloa-Loanda grouping, and the wider 3415th Infantry Regiment, which has now seen two separate groups of its soldiers sentenced to death this year alone, bear the most immediate consequences of the ruling. The civilian killed in the October shootings that triggered the case is a reminder that the unit's alleged misconduct also had a cost beyond the army's own ranks.

• 66 of 71 soldiers from the FARDC's 3415th Infantry Regiment were sentenced to death
• Four defendants were acquitted and one received a 10-year prison term
• The soldiers were arrested on October 20 in Walikale territory, North Kivu
• Amnesty International has counted at least 300 military-court death sentences since March 2024

Scrutiny from rights groups and the UN

The ruling arrives against a backdrop of mounting international criticism of Congo's reliance on capital punishment. Amnesty International documented at least 300 death sentences handed down by military courts in the months after the moratorium was lifted, and separate figures compiled by anti-death-penalty researchers working with Congolese partner organizations put the number sentenced to death at more than 480 in 2024 and 344 in 2025, up sharply from 122 in 2023, the last full year before the policy changed. Amnesty has argued more broadly that international human-rights mechanisms have said military courts should not have jurisdiction to impose death sentences at all, particularly against people who are not members of the armed forces. The organization has also noted that, despite the volume of sentences, Congolese authorities are not known to have carried out any executions since 2003.

The United Nations has pressed Kinshasa on the issue repeatedly since the moratorium was lifted. The UN General Assembly reaffirmed its long-standing position on the issue last December, when 130 member states backed a resolution calling for a worldwide moratorium on executions with a view to eventual abolition. MONUSCO, the UN's peacekeeping mission in the country, continues to monitor human-rights conditions in North Kivu and the wider east, including the conduct of military justice there, and the United Nations' own news service has tracked the broader debate over the death penalty's use worldwide. None of that pressure has altered the pace of military-court sentencing so far.

What happens next

Several questions remain open. It is not yet clear whether any of the 66 condemned soldiers will appeal to Congo's Haute Cour Militaire, the appellate body for military justice, a step available under the country's code of military justice. Nor is it clear whether the verdicts will be carried out: despite the hundreds of death sentences issued by Congolese military courts since 2024, authorities have not reported a single execution, suggesting that Friday's ruling, like those before it, may function more as a disciplinary deterrent than an imminent sentence to be carried out.

The 3415th regiment's legal troubles are also not over. Separate proceedings tied to earlier incidents involving the same unit, including a September case in which two of its soldiers were sentenced to death for killing their commander, remain part of a wider docket moving through the Goma garrison court's circuit sessions in Walikale. With fighting against the AFC/M23 coalition continuing across North Kivu, further prosecutions of Congolese soldiers accused of battlefield failures appear likely, keeping both the military justice system and the international criticism it has drawn firmly in view.

For now, the 66 men sentenced on Friday join hundreds of other Congolese defendants on a death row that, in practice, has yet to be used. Whether that gap between sentencing and execution continues to hold is likely to shape how both Congolese commanders and international observers read the deterrent value of a policy that has, so far, produced mass verdicts far more often than it has produced consequences carried out.