Genocide Suspects Research Articles

Post‐genocide justice: The Gacaca courts

AbstractIn the aftermath of the Rwandan genocide, the crippled formal judicial system failed to administer justice in a timely manner. A modified version of the traditional Gacaca courts was introduced to hear cases from the backlog of over 100,000 genocide suspects. We find that the Gacaca courts performed well relative to the formal justice system, given the constraints faced. The Gacaca courts generated valuable information about the genocide suspects and increased access to the justice system. The introduction of the Gacaca courts improved the performance of the formal justice system and facilitated post‐conflict recovery.

Justicia sobre la hierba. Tribunales Gacaca, lecciones de reconciliación para Colombia

In 1994, Rwanda underwent a terrible genocide between the Hutu and the Tutsi ethnic groups. The Rwandan Patriotic Front stopped the killings. The new government of the RPF built the Gacaca Courts as a justice and truth mechanism, its goal was to prevent the impunity of the genocide suspects and to promote reconciliation among Rwandans. The present article makes a contribution to the analysis of this case in order to establish how the experience of the Gacaca Courts can teach us something about the reconciliation process and for the current implementation of the Peace Agreements between the FARC-EP and the Colombian Government. The analysis focus on justice and reconciliation as the principal elements of the Gacaca Courts in order to build a parallelism between their postulates and experiences in implementing international legal standards of human rights, and the legitimacy of the mechanism of the Special Peace Jurisdiction in Colombia.

France, Universal Jurisdiction and Rwandangénocidaires

In 2014, 20 years after the Rwandan genocide, the first trial took place in France of a Rwandan génocidaire , Pascal Simbikangwa, despite the presence on French territory of a number of genocide suspects for many years, various extradition requests by Rwanda — declined by France — and numerous arrests and investigations. This article looks at questions surrounding jurisdiction in the Simbikangwa case and the reasons why the French courts heard this case. The article examines some issues that may hold significance in the future for the choice of arena in bringing to justice those suspects of the Rwandan genocide living in France.

The Gacaca Courts: Traditional Dispute Resolution in Post-Genocide Rwanda

In the aftermath of the Rwandan genocide the crippled formal judicial system failed to administer justice in a timely manner. A modified version of the traditional Gacaca courts were introduced to hear cases from the backlog of over 100,000 genocide suspects. We find that the Gacaca courts performed well relative to the formal justice system given the constraints faced. The Gacaca courts generated valuable information about the genocide suspects and increased access to the justice system. The introduction of the Gacaca courts improved the performance of the formal justice system and facilitated post-conflict recovery.

Negotiating Reconciliation in Rwanda: Popular Challenges to the Official Discourse of Post-Genocide National Unity

Reconciliation is among the most contested terms in current peacebuilding and transitional justice debates. Critics often view reconciliation as romantic—expecting immediate harmony after enormous harm—or imposed on victims by religious groups or governments that prefer the language of ‘moving on’ to addressing systemic causes of conflict. This essay reconsiders the concept of ‘reconciliation’ by drawing on community-level experiences in post-genocide Rwanda. This context highlights nuanced interpretations of reconciliation that, in key respects, respond to critics' concerns and call for reappraisal of reconciliation as a central objective after mass violence. In particular, many Rwandans' participation in the gacaca community courts—which, between 2002 and 2012, prosecuted 400,000 genocide suspects in around 1 million cases in 11,000 jurisdictions overseen by locally elected lay judges—represents a form of negotiated reconciliation. This version emphasizes long-term formal and informal negotiations between antagonistic parties during gacaca hearings but crucially long after trials have ended. In contrast, the transactional reconciliation advocated by the Rwandan government through its discourse of ‘national unity’ views reconciliation as immediate and elite-imposed—a perspective that rightly raises the ire of critics but to which negotiated reconciliation offers an important riposte. This essay is based on more than 650 interviews between 2003 and 2014 with Rwandan genocide suspects, convicted perpetrators, survivors, gacaca judges and policymakers as well as observations of 105 gacaca hearings in 13 communities across Rwanda.

Everyday suffering outside prison walls: A legacy of community justice in post-genocide Rwanda

Twenty years after the 1994 genocide, Rwanda shows all indications of moving quickly towards socio-economic prosperity. Rwanda's community justice system, Gacaca, was to complement this prosperity by establishing peace and stability through justice, reconciliation and healing. Evaluations of the Gacaca courts' achievements from 2002 to 2012 have had widely differing conclusions. This article adds to previous evaluations by drawing attention to specific forms of relatively neglected suffering (in literature and public space) that have emerged from the Gacaca courts or were amplified by these courts and jeopardize Gacaca's objectives. The ethnographic study that informs the article was conducted in southeastern Rwanda from September 2008–December 2012 among 19 ex-prisoners and 24 women with husbands in prison including their family members, friends and neighbors. Study findings suggest that large scale imprisonment of genocide suspects coupled with Gacaca court proceedings have tainted the suffering of ex-prisoners and women with imprisoned husbands in unique ways, which makes their plight unparalleled in other countries. We argue that the nature and scale of this suffering and the potentially detrimental impact on families and communities require humanitarian action. However, in Rwanda's post-genocide reality, the suffering of these two groups is overwhelmed by that of other vulnerable groups, such as genocide survivors and orphaned children; hence it is rarely acknowledged.

What a Difference a Day Makes: Young Perpetrators of Genocide in Rwanda

The participation of children in the Rwandan conflict is well-documented: children were involved in the whole range of acts committed in the course of the genocide. After the genocide, thousands of people were detained following mass arrests across Rwanda, and minors were amongst those arrested. Genocide trials by the formal courts began in 1996 but the majority of genocide suspects were dealt with by the Gacaca courts. Whilst much has been written on these post-conflict judicial mechanisms in Rwanda, there has been very little analysis of the legal and programmatic approach to young genocidaires. Based on an analysis of primary and secondary sources (including domestic legislation and case law) and drawing on the results of empirical research conducted in Rwanda in 2013, this paper provides a comprehensive account of how young perpetrators were dealt with in Rwanda both in law and practice. It seeks to determine whether children were held accountable, whether they were given differential treatment on grounds of their age and if so, what the relevant age thresholds were. These questions are explored in the context of arrests and detentions, the criminal justice mechanisms (both formal courts and Gacaca jurisdictions) and the administrative measures taken to address genocidal acts.

The Intensity of the Rwandan Genocide: Measures from the Gacaca Records

This article illustrates how fine continuous and categorical measures of genocide intensity can be derived from the records of the Rwandan transitional justice system. The data, which include the number of genocide suspects and genocide survivors across 1484 administrative sectors, are highly skewed and contain a non-negligible number of outlying observations. A number of genocide proxies are subjected to Principal Component Analysis (PCA) to obtain a genocide index, and the effect of survival bias on this index is reduced by augmenting the set of genocide proxies subjected to PCA with the distance from an administrative sector to the nearest mass grave. Finally, the administrative sectors are divided into distinct categories of low, moderate and high genocide intensity by means of Local Indicators of Spatial Auto-Correlation (LISA) that allow identifying significant high-high and low-low clusters of genocide intensity.

A Case Study in Underachievement: The International Courts and Genocide in Bosnia-Herzegovina

Two international courts—the UN's International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and the International Court of Justice (ICJ)—have established that genocide occurred in Srebrenica in Bosnia in 1995. Germany's courts have concluded that genocide occurred in both Northern and Eastern Bosnia in 1992, and an appeal against a conviction for genocide on this basis was dismissed by a third international court—the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR). Yet, there has been minimal international punishment of genocide in Bosnia. Serbia was convicted by the ICJ only of a failure to prevent and punish genocide. Only one middle-ranking individual has been definitely convicted of a genocide-related charge by the ICTY; three others of similar or lower rank have been convicted but are appealing the convictions. Only six individuals from Serbia or Montenegro were ever indicted by the ICTY for war crimes in Bosnia and no one has yet been convicted. Of the two most notorious Bosnian Serb genocide suspects—Ratko Mladić and Radovan Karadžić—the first has not yet been arrested while the second was arrested only in July 2008 and has not yet been convicted. International awareness that systematic mass murder occurred in Bosnia and the courts' conclusive verdict that at least some of this involved genocide have translated into minimal punishment of the perpetrators. This paper explores the reasons why international justice has underachieved in regards to the mass murder in Bosnia by examining the structural weaknesses, political pressures, and errors of judgment that have hampered the international courts.

A Case Study in Underachievement: The International Courts and Genocide in Bosnia-Herzegovina

Two international courts—the UN's International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and the International Court of Justice (ICJ)—have established that genocide occurred in Srebrenica in Bosnia in 1995. Germany's courts have concluded that genocide occurred in both Northern and Eastern Bosnia in 1992, and an appeal against a conviction for genocide on this basis was dismissed by a third international court—the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR). Yet, there has been minimal international punishment of genocide in Bosnia. Serbia was convicted by the ICJ only of a failure to prevent and punish genocide. Only one middle-ranking individual has been definitely convicted of a genocide-related charge by the ICTY; three others of similar or lower rank have been convicted but are appealing the convictions. Only six individuals from Serbia or Montenegro were ever indicted by the ICTY for war crimes in Bosnia and no one has yet been convicted. Of the two most notorious Bosnian Serb genocide suspects—...

The Intensity of the Rwandan Genocide: Fine Measures from the Gacaca Records

This article demonstrates how fine continuous and categorical measures of genocide intensity can be derived from the records of the Rwandan transitional justice system. The data, which include the number of genocide suspects and genocide survivors across 1484 administrative sectors, are highly skewed and contain a non-negligible number of outlying observations. After deriving nine proxies of genocide intensity from the data, various sets of these proxies are subjected to skewness-adjusted Robust Principal Component Analysis (ROBPCA), yielding four distinct continuous indices of genocide intensity. The effect of survival bias on these indices is reduced by augmenting the set of genocide proxies subjected to ROBPCA with the distance from an administrative sector to the nearest mass grave. Finally, the administrative sectors are divided into distinct categories of low, moderate and high genocide intensity by means of Local Indicators of Spatial Auto-Correlation (LISA) that allow identifying significant high-high and low-low clusters of genocide intensity.

Prosecution of Genocide v. the Fair Trial Principle: Comments on Brown and others v. The Government of Rwanda and the UK Secretary of State for the Home Department

The article examines the 2009 decision of the United Kingdom High Court of Justice to deny the extradition of four genocide suspects to Rwanda owing to fair trial and partiality concerns with the Rwandan judiciary. It begins by reviewing the relevant UK extradition legislation, the pertinent facts and the rationale for the judgment and proceeds to situate this decision within the broader transnational judicial scepticism about the extradition or transfer of genocide suspects to Rwanda. While this scepticism arises from valid concerns regarding the contemporary state of human rights in Rwanda, it nevertheless contributes to the perpetuation of impunity surrounding massive historical violations of human rights in the country. This article also enquires about appropriate burdens of proof when extraditing individuals accused of extraordinary international crimes, the importability of International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda referral judgments into the context of inter-state extradition, and the relationship between international human rights law and transitional justice.

Procedural due process and the prosecution of genocide suspects in Rwanda

Three transitional justice processes, namely the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), the National Genocide Trials (NGTs) and Gacaca courts, have been instituted to deal with the issues of justice and reconciliation in post-genocide Rwanda. All three processes are examples of the liberal-prosecution model, i.e. they seek to punish the perpetrators of the genocide. In their operation, the three processes have exhibited due process deficiencies which have impacted on the perception of “justice.” As a result, both the perpetrators and victim-survivors of the genocide feel that they are victims and not recipients of justice. This paper argues that the resulting deficiencies are due to the three processes being rooted in different prosecutorial traditions and philosophies. Whereas the ICTR is rooted in adversarial tradition, the National Genocide Trials are rooted in the inquisitorial tradition, and the Gacaca process is an example of popular justice. In view of the procedural deficiencies in the three processes therefore, the paper advocates for a restorative type of justice in post-genocide Rwanda.

THE GACACA PROCESS

which up to a million Tutsis and moderate Hutus were killed, the Rwandan government has launched a national judicial process aimed at bringing the perpetrators of the genocide to justice. Although trials of genocide suspects have been under way since 1996, according to some estimates it would have taken the Rwandan judicial system up to 150 years to try the over 100,000 people already detained on charges of genocide. Faced with this reality, the Rwandan government created the gacaca courts in 2001. They were subsequently introduced in a small number of pilot areas in two phases in 2002, and at national level in early 2005. One of the key objectives of the gacaca courts is to eradicate the ‘culture of impunity’ in Rwanda. Many Rwandans feel strongly that if the authors of past ethnic massacres in Rwanda had been properly punished, the 1994 genocide would not have taken place. Without proper justice, they say, impunity cannot be eradicated, and reconciliation, which is the second key objective of the process, will remain impossible. Based on a traditional form of communitylevel conflict resolution, the gacaca courts are essentially grassroots courts presided over by a group of nine judges who are elected by the community. The gacaca courts meet once a week, initially to gather, collate and, to some extent, verify information about what happened during the genocide, who was killed, and who may be accused of having participated in the killings. Once the information gathering period is completed, the courts move to the trial phase during which the accused will have an opportunity to defend themselves, or to plead guilty and confess. The hearings of the gacaca courts are public and mandatory, and are intended to promote widespread participation with the aim of getting as much information as possible about what happened during the genocide. So far, the experience of the pilot phase of the gacaca courts indicates that participation is high during the introductory stage of the process, largely as a result of curiosity, and tends to taper off somewhat later on. This has been attributed to a number of things, ranging from fear of reprisals for speaking openly and accusing people, to a significant loss of work time when attending the weekly meetings. It is too early to evaluate how participation at national level will evolve; however, the introduction of the gacaca courts at national level has created an atmosphere of heightened tension around the process. Observers agree that while the gacaca process was taking place in only a few areas of the country, it remained a source of curiosity. However, now that it has been introduced on a nationwide level, it has become a reality for all Rwandans – a reality that will force Rwandans to revisit the darkest period of their history each week for as long as the gacaca courts function. Revisiting this period of their THE GACACA PROCESS

After Arusha: Gacaca Justice in Post-Genocide Rwanda

The epicentre of post-genocide Rwandan society and politics has been the need for reconciliation to assuage ethnic tensions and end a culture of impunity. The International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) has yet to meet its goal of reconciliation in Rwanda: The failure of the tribunal goes beyond its institutional shortcomings and can be attributed the norms of international criminal law that render it an inappropriate response to criminalizing mass violence. The Gacaca courts were resurrected in Rwanda as an indigenous form of restorative justice. The principles and process of these courts hope to mitigate the failures of Arusha Justice at the tribunal and seeks to punish or reintegrate over one hundred thousands genocide suspects. Its restorative foundations require that suspects will be tried and judged by neighbours in their community. However, the revelation that Gacaca is a reconciliatory justice does not preclude its potential for inciting ethnic tension it if purports to serve as an instrument of Tutsi power. The state-imposed approach of command justice has politicised the identity of the participants in Gacaca -- perpetrators remain Hutus and victims and survivors remain Tutsis. Additionally, the refusal of the Kagame government to allow for the prosecution of RPF crimes to be tried in Gacaca courts empowers the notion that Tutsi survival is preconditioned by Tutsi power and impunity. If Gacaca fails to end the perceptions of impunity in post-genocide Rwanda, it will come at a much higher cost for reconciliation than the failure of the ICTR. The relevance of justice after genocide speaks to the appropriateness of retributive and restorative models of justice in a post-genocide society such as Rwanda. Additionally, the model of justice must be reconciled to the nature of a political regime that imposes unity under an ethnocratic minority.

Justice, democracy, and impunity in post-genocide Rwanda: Searching for solutions to impossible problems

Rwanda's judicial system, however, is not capable of responding to the challenge. Given the number of judges, prosecutors, and courthouses, most suspects now in custody may die of old age before they ever get to court. Rwanda's National Assembly adopted legislation in August 1996 to deal with genocide and crimes against humanity committed between October 1990 and December 1994. The country began to try genocide suspects in late December 1996. Some of the first trials were marred by the absence of defense counsel and impetuous refusals by trial judges to grant adjournments so the accused could find lawyers or otherwise prepare their cases. In cases where defense counsel was present, hearings were more acceptable from a human rights standpoint and provided Rwanda's judicial system with a model on which to base future prosecutions. Some observers from the international media and the diplomatic corps were initially critical of the trials, but much of this dissatisfaction actually resulted from unfamiliarity with the inquisitorial system. Conditions of detention in Rwandan prisons and the International Criminal Tribunal established by the United Nations Security Council for Rwanda are discussed.