RWANDA: ICTR closes down after indicting 93 people and sentencing 61
The International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) organized a celebration in its headquarters in Arusha, Tanzania, to mark its closure. Since the creation of the tribunal in 1994, at least 93 indictments were made with 61 people being sentenced; 14 acquitted; ten sent to Rwanda for trial; three died; two had their cases withdrawn and three others were transferred to the Mechanism for International Criminal Tribunal (MICT) which has a short mandate to finish the ICTR’s work. Nine of the indicted remain at large. Most of those indicted were senior government officials, military chiefs, businesspeople, priests and journalists, and include high-ranking representatives such as former Prime Minister Jean Kambanda, former Chief of Staff of the Army, Augustin Bizimungu, and the former Minister of Defence, Théoneste Basogora. The ICTR was the world’s first non-permanent UN tribunal. It was set up in 1994 to deal with international crimes and contributed significantly to the fight against impunity and to the development of international law regarding genocide with the inclusion of rape as one of its forms. Its work has been particularly challenging since the fact that it was created before the establishment of the ICC meant that international jurisprudence was altogether insufficient. The umbrella organization of Genocide survivors, Ibuka, has expressed its frustration over the failure of the ICTR to cooperate with survivors, the treatment of witnesses, some of the tribunal’s rulings, the tribunal’s refusal to grant the survivors complete access to some of the court’s documentations, or the fact that an International Trust Fund for reparation to Genocide survivors was never set up as previously agreed. Human Rights Watch has also criticized that very few members of the Rwandan Patriotic Front, including current President Paul Kagame, have been prosecuted. Other mechanisms have contributed to transitional justice in Rwanda, such as the controversial Gacaca tribunals to foster reconciliation, and the prosecution by tribunals in Belgium, Canada, Finland, France, Germany, Norway, The Netherlands, Sweden and Switzerland under the principle of universal jurisdiction.
(New Times, 02/12/15; El Pais, 26/12/15)