Rwanda Genocide Courts Denied Victims Fair Trials, Human Rights Watch Says
Rwanda’s government should review its community-based gacaca court system, which tried cases related to the country’s 1994 genocide, to probe alleged miscarriages of justice, Human Rights Watch said.
The system denied some defendants a fair trial and the courts were sometimes corrupt or used for political or personal gain, the New York-based advocacy group said in a report released today in Kigali, Rwanda’s capital.
“Many of these shortcomings can be traced back to the single most significant compromise made in choosing to use gacaca to try genocide cases: the curtailment of the fair trial rights of the accused,” it said.
Literally meaning “justice on the grass,” the gacaca courts were set up after 800,000 ethnic Tutsis and sympathetic Hutus were slaughtered by extremist Hutus in a genocide in 1994. Based on traditional Rwandan courts, the gacaca hearings take place in communities and the accused are encouraged to confess their crimes in exchange for a reduced sentence.
“If you have unfair trials whereas a large percentage of the population perceives the trials to have been flawed, or motivated by private interests or even political interests, that doesn’t serve justice in the long term,” Leslie Haskell, a Human Rights Watch’s Africa division researcher and author of the report, said in an interview.
Rwanda’s government said the title of the report, Justice Compromised: The Legacy of Rwanda’s Community-Based Gacaca Court, “distorts the image of gacaca” and misrepresented the contents of the report in an attempt to “grab headlines.”
‘Great Achievement’
“Through gacaca we have been able to judge and resolve more than 1 million dossiers, a great achievement that would have been impossible otherwise,” Justice Minister Tharcisse Karugarama said in an e-mailed statement.
The report also praised the gacaca system, saying it provided swift justice, helped families find victims’ remains and encouraged community participation.
“Gacaca may have also helped some of victims find a way to live peacefully with neighbours who may have perpetrated crimes against them or their families,” it said.
With more than a million suspects, the courts began hearing cases in 2005. Trying that many cases in the national courts was believed to need hundreds of years, said Haskell. She said she hoped Rwanda’s government would set up special courts to revisit about 100 cases that have been identified as flawed.
“The government has acknowledged that they may need to review cases,” Haskell said. “There are cases with no evidence, and cases where judges were bought off.”
The report also said the courts delivered uneven justice by refusing to hear war crimes cases against members of the Rwandan Patriotic Front, Rwanda’s ruling party, largely credited for ending the genocide and stabilizing the country.
To contact the reporter on this story: Heather Murdock in Kigali via Nairobi at pmrichardson@bloomberg.net.
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Paul Richardson at pmrichardson@bloomberg.net.
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