Rwanda’s prosecutor general Martin Ngoga has told Igihe.com that Government of Rwanda is willing to continue offering its support to the Internaitonal Criminal Court at Hague in Netherlands.
Ngoga was reacting to news that FDLR’s Callixte Mbarushimana is slated to face ICC judges this week to confirm charges for his alleged role in the murder, rape and torture of Congolese civilians in 2009.
“Even though we’re not signatories to the Rome statute, we will support them (ICC) where necessary. So far we have assisted them in investigations and we hope to work more with the international court especially in transferring home some of the genocide fugitives,” Ngoga explained.
Ngoga also revealed that Rwanda intends to press genocide charges against Mbarushimana once the ICC is done with his case on human rights violations.
“We didn’t want to mix all these cases at once, let the ICC finish its case first and then we will come later, our aim also is to have him extradited back to Rwanda,” said Ngoga.
Prosecutors will try to prove to the ICC judges that they have enough evidence to proceed to a war crimes and crimes against humanity trial against the 48-year-old Rwandan.
Lawyers for the man identified as the executive secretary of the FDLR rebel group will also be given a chance to refute the charges in a hearing that opens on Wednesday and is set to last three days.
After the initial hearing closes, judges at the Hague-based court will have a maximum of 60 days to decide whether there are prema-facie grounds for the trial.
ICC prosecutors accuse the former computer technician of five counts of crimes against humanity and six war crimes committed in 2009 in two provinces in the eastern part of the Democratic Republic of Congo, North Kivu and South Kivu.
The case included murder, rape and torture against Congolese civilians. Prosecutors believe he “directed or helped to direct” from Paris the abuses carried out in clashes between the FDLR and both the Congolese and Rwandan armies.
Prosecutors further allege that FDLR members forced civilian men to rape women, mutilated the genitals of rape victims, cut open the wombs of pregnant women to remove their fetuses, and burnt down homes.
The FDLR, considered one of the most active rebel groups in the volatile Great Lakes region, is “the last incarnation of the group of persons who committed the 1994 genocide in Rwanda”, ICC chief prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo has previously said.
More than 15,000 cases of sexual violence have been reported in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) in 2009.
Mbarushimana’s lawyer Nick Kaufman noted that the defense will “Argue and prove that there is no evidence to support the charges against Mbarushimana and he is not guilty of the offences the prosecution has alleged he has committed.”
Kaufman further said the ICC prosecutor’s case “Solely relied on human rights reports coming from NGOs whose sources are unverified and unreliable”.
Mbarushimana was arrested on an ICC warrant in October last year in Paris, where he had been living as a political refugee since 2002, and was delivered to the world court in January.
Imprisoned at the UN’s detention centre in The Hague, he made an initial appearance before the ICC on January 28 when he protested his innocence.
Leave a Reply