High Court president Charles Kaliwabo has called on judges to use their powers to prescribe penalties that will deter members of the public from resorting to criminality as source of livelihood.

Judge Kaliwabo said this, yesterday, as judges of the high court, intermediate and primary courts across the country, convened in a video conference under the theme, "Harmonisation of criminal penalties to protect the Rwandan society.”

The meeting is held twice a year to evaluate the work of judges and measure their performance against the general trajectory of the country.

Different speakers at the meeting agreed that depending on the trend of criminality and the rate of recidivism, it would be hard to contain crime in the country with absence of preventive measures.

Part of the preventive measures, according to Kaliwabo, is for judges to use their discretion in prescribing rulings in such a way that will deter convicts from committing the same crime and warn members of society about consequences of crime.

"The significance of sentence handed out should not only be legally binding –where convicts are corrected accordingly—it should as well be about discouraging other members in the society not to indulge in such unlawfully behaviour,” Kaliwabo said.

"There are some people out here who have resolved to make crime their source of livelihood; we have to make it harder for them but it should be within the confines of the law.”

The High Court judge said most judges, probably while considering where the country is coming from, especially in the post-Gacaca courts era – which extended an olive branch to Genocide convicts –, end up considering this to give less sentences to common criminals, especially those that plead guilty.

This, he said, is abetting criminality.

"We have been so lenient, especially on appeal cases, where depending on pleas, suspects had made it a habit to request judges to lessen penalties by just making lame excuses,” he said.

According to the statistics on crime presented during a televised conference, last month, there has been a rise in crime to 1,462 from 1,195 that were registered in January.

Among crimes committed since January, 580 of them were financial in nature, 414 were recorded as cases involving defilement; 204 cases were related to Genocide ideology while the rest were related to violence and assaults.

Asked if the call on the judges would not compromise the independence of the judiciary in handling cases and making sure they fall within legal provisions, Emmanuel Itamwa, the spokesperson of the courts said the autonomy of the judges is not an end in itself.

"Much as we all believe in the independence of the judges in handling cases before them and in line with what the law says, training and evaluation meetings like this can help them increase capacity and competence to deal with other cases in the near future,” he said.

The conference, which is the third since 2014, follows others that studied other key areas relating to backlog of cases that have been pending while the one last year reviewed the trials handled with view of analysing the judges’ competencies.

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