Judges train in Common Law

Twenty three judges from Supreme Court and Commercial courts have concluded four-day training in handling commercial cases.

Saturday, September 22, 2012
Chief Justice Sam Rugege

Twenty three judges from Supreme Court and Commercial courts have concluded four-day training in handling commercial cases.The training was conducted by two British experts at the invitation of the Supreme Court.The training focused on common law approaches to management of commercial cases involving; banks, bank organisations and bank insolvency, bank regulations and banks-customer relations.Closing the training, the Chief Justice Sam Rugege expressed optimism on the great benefit from the training acquired by judges and Rwanda community. Commending the trainers, Rugege observed that Rwanda is running at a terrific speed to compensate for the wasted years but the speed comes with challenges."Owing to the economic associated challenges in Rwanda, we invited experts from the UK where common law has been practiced for quite some time to come and train our judges so as to reinforce our system. These are commercial high court judges and experts,” explained Rugege.The Commercial Court president Benon Gatete explained that commercial courts set up in 2007 and became operational in 2008 were introduced to manage a backlog of cases mostly between banks and clients or between foreign and local banks."At first we sent our judges to South Africa for masters’ courses in commercial law, in 2009, London University sent us experts in banking, we borrow from common law good practices to manage some cases and due to East African Integration, we tend to use common law than civil law approach,” Gatete explained.