EDITORIAL: Future tribunals should learn from ICTR’s failures

Jean Paul Akayesu, the former Mayor (Bourgmestre) of Taba, in present day Kamonyi District, was the first person to be tried and convicted by the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR). He was charged with organizing and overseeing mass killings during the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi. But what made Akayesu’s judgment stand out was it was the first time rape was recognized as a weapon of war; a war crime. Long before the ICTR’s decision, Rwanda had already categorized the perpetrators of the 1994 Genocide into four categories; the planners, those who acted in positions of authority, “notorious murderers who by virtue of the zeal or excessive malice with which they committed atrocities”, and those who committed sexual violence. That the ICTR recognized Rape as a war crime could be its sole achievement, but it failed miserably in many areas that could have helped bring closure to survivors of the Genocide. One widely shared reasoning was that the court was compromised by some powerful members of the UN to which the ICTR was powerless to resist. Even though the tribunal did not have the monopoly of trying Genocide suspects, it had primacy over national jurisdictions. But it abdicated that role of prosecuting notorious criminals to countries that had vested interests, and some were set free while others did not step inside the court room and are roaming free – two decades later. One can enumerate the many wrongs committed by the ICTR unendingly, but what one cannot ignore is that it put war crimes back on the radar, after the widely mediatised Nuremburg trials that dealt with Nazi crimes. The ICTR was a learning curve and it is hoped that the lessons learnt – as the outgoing Prosecutor, Hassan Bubacar Jallow termed it – will be used as a yardstick in future criminal prosecutions.

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EDITORIAL: Future tribunals should learn from ICTR’s failures