Word: courting
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Bagosora was convicted with two other military officers (another man was acquitted), and their trial, known as "Military I," was massive. It began in 2002, and eventually heard 242 witnesses over 408 court days, with tens of thousands of pages of documents and 300 written decisions. It was to be the great symbol of the tribunal's power to bring justice for the 800,000 victims of the genocide. Prosecutors had said it was one of the most important cases since the term "genocide" was legally defined in 1948. It is the kind of conviction that could go a long...
Another 40 or so are either in custody or remain fugitives. The court has been plagued by delays - from lawyers who died to procedural stalling to the difficulty of flying in witnesses or providing them with proper protection back home. "This case in some ways shows that these international justice tribunals can make a difference and can actually change the course of history to break the cycle of violence because Bagosora and the other two really were the key characters who were pulling the strings at the time the genocide started," says Binaifer Nowrojee, director of the Open Society Initiative...
Among its successes was the fact that the Rwanda court got judicial recognition of rape as a weapon of genocide - though the court has taken testimony from only a handful of witnesses in the face of hundreds of thousands of incidents of sexual violence. That classification, nevertheless, has been passed on to the International Criminal Court, the larger judicial body that is taking on cases of war crimes and genocide world wide...
...there is much work left to be done, and the ICTR is not being given a great deal of time to do it. The court is now under pressure from the U.N. General Assembly and the Security Council to wrap up its work on the Rwanda genocide soon, by reducing its staff numbers and finishing cases quickly. The court now believes it can have all its trial work finished in 2009, a year later than planned, and has recently asked the General Assembly for more money to push it through to the end of 2009, apart from...
...ICTR had originally been intended to try all those guilty of genocide or violations of humanitarian law. But it was slow to get moving - three years passed before the first trial started. Finally, when it became clear in 2003 that the court was proceeding too slowly, prosecutors shifted their focus to high-level cases and transferred the rest to national courts or Rwanda's gacaca system, styled after South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission, in which alleged perpetrators get lighter sentences if they acknowledge their guilt before an audience of victims or their families...