Frédéric Mégret, Le Tribunal Pénal International pour le Rwanda, Perspectives Internationales 23, Paris, Pedone, 2002, ISBN 2233004108, 249 pp., €24.00 (original) (raw)
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Rwanda: International and National Responses to the Mass Atrocities and Their Interaction
DOMAC Case Study Series, 2010
THE DOMAC PROJECT focuses on the actual interaction between national and international courts involved in prosecuting individuals in mass atrocity situations. It explores what impact international procedures have on prosecution rates before national courts, their sentencing policies, award of reparations and procedural legal standards. It comprehensively examines the problems presented by the limited response of the international community to mass atrocity situations, and offers methods to improve coordination of national and international proceedings and better utilization of national courts, inter alia, through greater formal and informal avenues of cooperation, interaction and resource sharing between national and international courts. THE DOMAC PROJECT is a research program funded under the Seventh Framework Programme for EU Research (FP7) under grant agreement no. 217589. The DOMAC project is funded under the Socio-economic sciences and Humanities Programme for the duration of three years starting 1st February 2008.
Bond Law Review, 2001
extract] To delve more deeply into the ICTR's handicap in addressing the human rights situation in Rwanda through the international penal process, this Article makes use of a distinction of looking at human, social or for that matter world affairs: the actor-orientated and structure-orientated perspectives. They can be seen as two ways of reflecting, and reflecting on, social affairs and legal tradition, each of them focusing on different aspects. The legal paradigm (especially criminal law) is biased in favour of the actor-oriented perspective due to its simplistic concreteness, identification of the evil actor, apprehension and prosecution. This Article sets out to consider how far the ICTR has fulfilled its objectives, which transcend the prosecution and conviction of guilty persons. The contention is that the ICTR still has not made the most of its opportunity to facilitate change. The Article explains some of the reasons why the ICTR has not fulfilled this opportunity.
Justice for Rwanda: Toward a Universal Law of Armed Conflict
The Geneva Conventions classify armed conflicts as either "international" or "non-international", covering international conflicts with greater protections. Yet many so-called "non-international" conflicts have an international dimension that could cause them to be reclassified as international, bringing them broader coverage under the laws of war. In this paper, I examine the international aspects of the Rwandan civil war.
Rwanda Genocide and the International Community
I will start the essay by addressing the actions of the international community during the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. This will follow with a brief history of the two ethnic groups, the Tutsi and the Hutu, dating from pre-colonial times with a view to establish how the colonial influence has impacted the two ethnic groups into conflict and rivalry, despite long periods of ‘democratic’ living. I will then argue the IMF-World Bank structural adjustment program caused the deterioration of Rwanda’s economy as another cause, which has influenced the genocide. This will be followed by evidence showing the direct responsibility of the main actors of the international community with a focus on the U. S. and the UK support of the Rwandan Patriotic Front to secure a legal presence in Rwanda due to geopolitical interests in having access to the Congo’s mineral wealth. I will also argue the accuracy of the officially supported narrative of the genocide, presenting conclusive evidence towards the alternative narrative, which suggests the U.S. and its allies interests in overthrowing the Hutu-based Rwandan government. Finally this essay will briefly discuss post-genocide Rwanda and the crisis in the Congo, coming to the conclusion that mass human rights violations continue to be perpetrated in the Rwanda and neighbouring Congo due to main international actors’ overpowering geopolitical interests.
New England Journal of International and Comparative Law, 2008
What will be the legacy of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda? Existing literature suggests that jurisprudence and hard-won “best practice” are the most valued commodities. Celebrating this bequeathal to the corpus of international law is testament to the Tribunal’s hard-won vivification of the crimes over which it has jurisdiction. Reducing the Tribunal’s work to “black letter” jurisprudence and technical “best practice” is, however, an expression of the teleological and utilitarian ethos of legal knowledge which extracts usable commodities from the evolving, contingent social context in which they are fashioned.
National Prosecution of International Crimes Committed During the Rwandan Genocide
This memorandum was part of an optional research internship at the Faculty of Law of the Free University of Amsterdam (VU Amsterdam) during the Master International Crimes and Criminology. Two interns were selected to be part of the Vertical Inconsistency of International Sentencing project, headed by the project leader and subsequently the supervisor of this internship, Barbora Hola. The memorandum discusses ten genocide cases tried before ordinary Rwandan courts in 2004 and 2005.
The international criminal courts (ICCs) - the ad hoc International Criminal Tribunals for the Former-Yugoslavia and for Rwanda, the recently-established permanent International Criminal Court, and hybrid internationalized tribunals such as the Special Court for Sierra Leone - are the international community's attempt to address the worst of the criminal manifestations of racism, nationalism and large-scale xenophobia. Based on five months of ethnographic research at the international criminal tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), analyzed using Erving Goffman's dramaturgical framework, this article examines the means through which moral authority is constructed and communicated by the ICTR. Specifically, the article advances the argument that the ICCs seek to personify the Generalized Other; that they claim to embody the universal authority and morality of the international community. The generalized other is an organized and generalized attitude with reference to which individuals define their conduct. The Generalized Other and institutions help socialize people in different parts of society to have the same responses, interests, and moral beliefs and conceptions of selves needed for understanding and synchronizing with others. It is through interactions - immediate and mediated - with Generalized Others that the self arises and is negotiated; that stigmatization of individuals and groups occur; that social concepts are defined; and that psychological citizenship manifests. Therefore, the interplay between inclusion and exclusion, hegemony and diversity in institutions that have the potential not only to communicate for, but also to embody and personify the international Generalized Other, as well as the very existence of such social institutions, is of great social significance. The analysis of the ethnographic data traces the three dimensions of jurisdiction - geographical jurisdiction (space), temporal jurisdiction (time) and subject-matter jurisdiction (story) - which are also the three dimensions of theater and of reality. In describing the negotiation of each dimension the article explores the philosophical notion that law qua law claims legitimate and supreme authority and the sociological notion that courts, including international criminal courts, are among the most significant institutions to perform, dramaturgically speaking, such claims by explaining that, more specifically, courts try to fashion themselves as the embodiment of a truly universal Generalized Other proclaiming the universal morality of the international community. In contrast to that projected unity, a close decoding of the face-to-face interactions, the performances, which give rise to the abstraction the ICTR demonstrate that the negotiated reality that is the ICTR (and by implication, ICCs generally) is an emergent of and, at least to a degree, a reflection of cultural and gender differences and diversity. Whether or not one concludes that the ICTR's projection is successful, the attempt has profound implications for the formation of the self and citizenship of individuals in the international sphere.
The International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda and Post- Genocide Justice 25 Years On
European Journal of International Law, 2020
2019 marked the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Rwandan genocide and of the establishment of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR). After prosecuting seventy-three people, including high-ranking politicians and military leaders, the Rwanda Tribunal closed its doors in 2015. Together with its sister tribunal, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, the ICTR is considered one of the first generation ad hoc tribunals mandated to bring justice to countries emerging from conflict. This review essay examines four books to take stock of the scholarly debate on the ICTR's performance. After analyzing the Tribunal's achievements and shortcomings, it explains that scholarly assessments of the ICTR rely on two different analytical lenses-a national or international perspective-to make claims about the roles of international criminal tribunals generally. The essay then discusses the ICTR's interactions with other post-genocide justice mechanisms in Rwanda and the compatibility of concurrent judicial responses to mass violence. It concludes by noting that interpretations of the ICTR's performance continue to evolve, reflecting prevailing ideas about the goals and limitations of international criminal tribunals within the field of transitional justice.
The tragedy which befell Rwanda in 1994 deserves a special place in the bloodstained pages of history. The Rwandan genocide merits distinction primarily because of its shocking efficiency, its scale and its proportional dimensions among the victim population. The Security Council's resolution establishing the ICTR articulates a set of decisions, assumptions, wishes, and objectives. Primarily, the States that voted in favour of the creation of the ICTR indicated that the root of the problem was individual violations of international criminal law. Only one State that voted for the resolution did not equate ipso facto ICTR actions with justice. That State considered the ICTR only one of the many tasks at hand for the international community. The ICTR was merely a vehicle of justice, 'but it is hardly designed as a vehicle for reconciliation.... Reconciliation is a much more complicated process' (Czech Republic). Interestingly, Rwanda, which voted against the resolution, spoke of the problem in terms of a culture of impunity. The UN paid little to no heed to the subtle, but extremely different way in which the problem was characterised and the implications this would have on the type of tool needed to deal with that problem.