Word: ictr
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...prepares to wrap up by the end of 2013, celebrations over his arrest will not ease a long-held sense of discontent about the genocide's aftermath and whether justice has really been served. For all the big fish it may have landed, the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) has yet to consider the case of a single person accused of committing atrocities on behalf of the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), the guerrilla movement led by now President Paul Kagame...
Many reports from the genocide indicate that the RPF killed some 45,000 people in a murderous campaign of its own. Experts have long said that those killers must also come before the ICTR. "If you deliver justice on one side and not the other, you leave a group of people angry and resentful, and they don't forget," renowned Rwanda investigator Alison des Forges told TIME last year, weeks before she died in a plane crash. Des Forges was insistent in her demand that members of the RPF face justice, but with her voice silenced and the tribunal winding...
There is another embarrassing fact about the ICTR. The tribunal is overburdened in part because referring cases back to Rwanda is politically fraught. Courts in France, Germany and Britain have refused to allow genocide suspects to be extradited to Rwanda for fear that they will not face a fair trial. "We have a lot of concerns about whether the Rwandan judiciary is independent," a Rwanda human-rights researcher, who did not wish to be named because that is their organization's policy, tells TIME. "Judges are being told how to decide cases; they don't always have the freedom...
...ICTR has also come under criticism for not prosecuting anyone from President Paul Kagame's Rwandan Patriotic Front, the rebel group that various human rights organizations say was also guilty of genocide. But it has taken that line partly because Kagame himself has obstructed the court in the past, at one point barring witnesses from coming to testify when the court announced its intention to pursue Kagame's allies...
...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...