Chui. His trial opened on 26 January 2009. On 14 March 2012 Lubanga was found guilty of abducting boys and girls under the age of 15 and forcing them to fight in a war in the Democratic Republic of Congo in 2002 and 2003. He faced a maximum sentence of 30 years when sentenced in July 2012. Sentence On 10 July 2012, Lubanga was sentenced for 14 years by the ICC The sentencing was a landmark for the first permanent international criminal court, which recently celebrated its 10th anniversary. Presiding judge Adrian Fulford said the time Lubanga had spent in the court's detention centre in The Hague would be taken into account, meaning his sentence has only 8 more years to run. During the first review in October 2015, Lubanga pleaded with ICC judges to grant him early release, promising to promote reconciliation and offering "sincere apologies for all victims for the suffering they endured". In September 2015, judges decided not to reduce Lubanga’s sentence after finding that there were no factors in favor of his early release. They found no evidence that he had genuinely dissociated from his crimes and also determined that Lubanga had not taken any significant action for the benefit of victims of his crimes. In the second review decision, judges ruled that there had been no changes in Lubanga’s cooperation with the court or in his actions to benefit victims. In December 2015, Lubanga was transferred to the DRC to serve the rest of his sentence from his home country’s Makala prison. In November 2017, ICC judges Silvia Fernández de Gurmendi, Howard Morrison, and Piotr Hofmańsk declined to reduce Lubanga’s sentence, after determining that since the initial review of the sentence two years earlier, there had been no significant change in circumstances to warrant his early release. The judges also stated that they saw no reason to schedule a further review of Lubanga’s sentence. On 15 March 2020, Lubanga was released after serving the 14-year sentence. Controversies Lubanga's trial, the ICC's first, led to several controversies: The trial was halted on 13 June 2008 when the court ruled that the Prosecutor's refusal to disclose potentially exculpatory evidence had breached Lubanga's right to a fair trial. The Prosecutor had obtained the evidence from the United Nations and other sources on the condition of confidentiality, but the judges ruled that the Prosecutor had incorrectly applied the relevant