Paul Christoph Bornkamm. Rwanda's Gacaca Courts. Between Retribution and Reparation

Abstract

The commencement of proceedings at the Gacaca Courts in Rwanda on 18 June 2002 attracted enormous interest. The question of how the country would deal with a past shaped by the genocide that had ended eight years earlier not only aroused the curiosity of national observers, it also attracted large numbers of international commentators. This situation remained largely unchanged in the years that followed. It sometimes seemed as though a constant stream of academics, in particular, were lining up to take a look at the traditional Rwandan justice workshop. A correspondingly large number of publications on Gacaca have been issued so far. Articles, essays, and books have been published, the quality of which is extremely varied and can generally be measured by the extent to which the author retained a capacity for critical analysis when confronted with the details of the horrendous crimes typical of genocide. As is generally known, emotional involvement can easily clash with judicial appraisal, which must send a robust and future-oriented signal. The book under review is based on a doctoral thesis submitted to Humboldt-Universitat zu Berlin in late 2009. However, the Gacaca justice process for the judicial appraisal of crimes of genocide did not reach its conclusion until 18 June 2012, ten years to the day after its establishment. The Rwandan government recently published the following general summary data on the process: Gacaca proceedings were instigated against just over one million suspects, of whom 90 per cent were men and only 10 per cent women. By far the majority of the proceedings concerned so-called Category 3 acts, i.e., unauthorized acts against property, for example, theft and plunder (a total of 1.3 million individual acts). These were followed in number by Category 2 acts, which included murder, manslaughter, and grievous bodily harm (577,000 individual acts). �