Genocide: Why no one should be surprised by French court verdicts

Editor, Refer to the article, “French court releases genocidaire” (The New Times, April 5). Anyone who thinks there will ever be any justice in French courts for the victims of the Genocide against Rwanda’s Tutsi is in deep denial. The French state was fully complicit in that crime of crimes and its courts can hardly try themselves as they are an integral part of that state. The principle of natural justice holds that none be a judge in his own cause. How can we expect the French to judge suspects for a crime the French state itself, at its highest levels, abetted and supported before, during and after the fact? The Simbikangwa case is an outlier, and may have been intended to throw dust in the eyes of the global public to try to refurnish France’s tattered reputation regarding their role in that genocide. He may also have been considered to be privy to very little damaging information on France’s own role in the Genocide and that his trial process could be so controlled that no such damaging information, even if he had any, would be allowed to come into the open. The state clearly feels differently about any trial—especially outside France—of these other suspects. It will, therefore, never allow their extradition, even if it uses the very risible justification that genocide was not on Rwanda’s statute books when the suspects committed it in 1994. This ridiculous piece of judicial rigmarole (at the level of “the dog ate my homework”) flies in the face of the fact that multiple murders are the underlying crimes in genocide, and that murder was fully on those statute books in 1994. It also ignores the fact that both France and Rwanda are party to the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, France through ratification in December 1948, and Rwanda through accession in April 1975. In other words, using the excuse that the crime of genocide was not on Rwanda’s statute books in 1994 when the crimes for which Claude Muhayimana’s extradition to Rwanda for trial is sought does not stand because international treaties to which a state accedes or which it ratifies are part of that state’s corpus of laws. By using that excuse to refuse extradition by a state party to the Convention, France, is therefore, in reality itself in a lawless act as it is a continuation of a serious breach of France’s treaty obligation to prevent and to punish or to facilitate punishment for the crime of genocide. But only the utterly naive, or visitors from Outer Space unaware of France’s deep involvement in the Genocide against Rwanda’s Tutsi, would be surprised at this verdict. It is fully in line with a pattern that reflects what the French judiciary believes to be in line with their state’s interest, genocide be damned. Mwene Kalinda

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Genocide: Why no one should be surprised by French court verdicts