The International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) will accelerate hearing of single cases in a bid to curb down the back log of genocide cases committed during the 1994 Tutsi genocide.

This will be part of the completion strategy of the court after receiving a one year mandate extension .

This was revealed Monday by Justice Dennis Byron, the ICTR president, at the Regional  Media Workshop organised by Hirondelle News Agency in Arusha under the theme "Media Accountability: Lessons from Rwanda and ICTR legacy”.

He pointed out that the old system of jointly handling cases has largely contributed to the backlog of cases at the court explaining that multi –accused cases are complex and demand a lot of time.

He was responding to a question raised on why the court had handled few cases since its establishment in 1997.

"We have developed new schedules for cases to reduce the backlog. The prosecution will handle five to six trials and the same (vice versa) for the defence. We anticipate this to increase the number of judgments handled. Generally there will be an intended accelerated rate of judgment delivery,” he said. 

Relying on the prior practice of the Tribunal , calculations and projections for the new single –accused trials  are premised on a 10 weeks on average trial per case (five weeks for the Prosecution case and then the same time frame for the defence case ).

Speaking to The New Times, Gershom Otachi  Bw’Omanwa , a defence council with ICTR , endorsed and reaffirmed the decision by the court to  handle single cases as a better system to accelerate the  court’s work for the remaining period and emphasised that joint trials consume a lot of time , with the court spending at least six years on a single case.

"Handling single cases is more efficient because single trials move very fast. If this had been done right from the beginning, the court would have done more work. Joint trials normally have conflict of interest within the witnesses and the accused. This further complicates the situation,” he explained.

Adding that at times joint trails also delay because by court procedure everybody involved in the case had to be present yet in most cases this is not possible,” he explained.

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