Category: Justice

KIGALI, Jan. 22 (Xinhua) — {A Rwandan court Thursday handed two former Rwanda Police officers 20 years in jail after finding them guilty of murdering an anti-corruption campaigner who was killed while investigating mineral smuggling from neighboring Democratic Republic of Congo (DR Congo).}

Gustave Makonene, former coordinator for anti-corruption body Transparency International, was found dead in July 2013 in Rubavu, western Rwanda near the border with eastern Congo.

Rubavu High Court found Corporals Nelson Iyakaremye and Isaac Ndabarinze guilty of murder of Makonene.

His body was found by residents on the shores of Lake Kivu a day after his death.

Ndabarinze was arrested in Kigali last September, while his co- accused was serving a sentence after he was arrested and charged with mineral smuggling.

The suspects killed Makonene because he was aware that the two men were involved in mineral smuggling from DR Congo to Rwanda, the prosecutor Vincent Niyonzima told court during the trial.

Niyonzima said the deceased had told the two men to stop their activities.

Delivering the verdict, presiding judge Esron Gashyende said while the crime attracted life sentence the convicts received lighter sentences because they pleaded guilty to the charges and eased investigations.

The duo never complicated the case and will not pay any indemnity, he said.

Reacting to the ruling, Transparent International Rwanda staff and the deceased’s family members said they were surprised by the ‘ light’ verdict.

“We followed the case but we were surprised by the court’s decision, the judiciary has its independence but the sentence is lenient..we shall sit with the deceased family and see if we can appeal,” Apollinaire Mupiganyi, the executive director of Transparency International Rwanda told journalists.

Prosecution had asked for life jail term due to the gravity of the crime which it said was well planned before being executed.

Both suspects testified during the trial that they planned to kill the anti-graft activist because he was an obstacle to their business.

They recounted how they led the victim from a local bar- handcuffed and bundled him into a car before strangling him.

The men requested court for forgiveness and a light sentence since they pleaded guilty to the charges.

Eastern DR Congo is rich in minerals such as tin, tungsten and tantalum but smuggling has thrived because Kinshasa government has little control over a big region fought over by various militia and rebel groups for decades.

Arusha, January 22, 2015 (FH) – {The most complicated trial at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) is not finished. Although the Tribunal was due to close its doors at the end of 2014, the UN Security Council in December had to renew the mandate of certain judges to complete the longest trial in the history of international justice, which includes the only woman indicted by the ICTR, as well as five others.
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This trial, which includes ex-minister Pauline Nyiramasuhuko, is unlikely to be finished before the second half of this year, according to ICTR forecasts.

As well as its length, this trial also has other particularities that make it unique in the history of international justice. Nyiramasuhuko is not just only the only woman indicted by the ICTR but also by an international criminal court, and the allegations against her include rape.

She became a member of the former Rwandan government after belated university studies, and is on trial with her son, Arsène Shalom Ntahobali, among others. Now a grandmother, this Christian woman who is never seen without her rosary was sentenced to life in prison by the trial court for acts including rape committed at her command. And according to the trial court judgment, one of those who raped Tutsi women and girls was none other than her son, Shalom, at the time a young, newly married university student.

According to the trial court judges, the former minister “conspired with other members of the interim government to commit genocide in Butare (southern Rwanda)”. They said she exercised command authority over Interahamwe militia who committed rape in the offices of the Butare prefect.

Pauline Nyiramasuhuko and her Canadian lawyer Nicole Bergevin have always claimed she was victim of a smear campaign orchestrated by the current Rwandan regime of Paul Kagame’s Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF).

“It’s an abomination to claim that Pauline Nyiramasuhuko went so far as to order her son to rape young Tutsi women,” said Bergevin in her final arguments in April 2009.

Nyiramasuhuko expressed the same sentiment when she addressed the court in her own defence in September 2005. “How can you imagine that a woman like me would do such things?” she said.

But her words did not convince the trial judges, and she is now awaiting her appeals hearing, for which the date is yet to be set.

Conflict of interests
Another particularity of this trial is its complexity, due notably to the number of accused persons: six in total. It is the biggest joint trial in the history of the ICTR, which had to abandon its initial plan for a mega-trial.

Nyiramasuhuko and the other people tried with her are all from the Butare prefecture in southern Rwanda. Thus it has been dubbed the “Butare trial”. Two of the other five accused, former Butare prefect Sylvain Nsabimana and former mayor Joseph Kanyabashi, were members of the Social Democrat Party (PSD), a small party in opposition to the former single party MRND, to which Nyiramasuhuko and her family remained loyal. In their defence, Nsabimana and Kanyabashi tried to convince the judges that only the MRND could have incited the massacres in Butare. But Nyiramasuhuko and her son responded that although the MRND was popular in other regions of Rwanda, notably the north, it had little support in the south, especially the university town of Butare.

This conflict of interest between the accused was often visible during the hearings, with heated exchanges between the lawyers, to the grand satisfaction of the prosecution.

This trial will also go down in history as the longest and no doubt the costliest in the history of international justice. Started in June 2001, the hearings were especially long, because of difficulties with the witnesses and the slowness of questioning, which Tanzanian presiding judge William Hussein Sekule had difficulty cutting short. Many expert witnesses also appeared in the case, many of whom remained for months in the witness box. Not forgetting the onerous work of translation. For example, the trial court judgment was handed down in English on June 24, 2011, but the French version was only distributed to the six convicts in 2013. Yet they could not exercise their right to appeal without having read the judgment in a language they understand.

According to Danish judge Vagn Joensen, president of the ICTR, the deadline for filing appeals ended in October 2013 and the appeals hearing is expected in March, whereas the final appeals judgment is not expected until at least August. The trial will thus have lasted more than 14 years and Shalom’s mother, now 69, will have spent 16 years in preventive detention.

ER/ JC

{Rwanda’s Supreme Court has issued a decision stating that it will not hear DGPR’s lawsuit on the non-respect of French Language, which was filed on 8th December 2014.
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The Supreme Court decision states that, the case could not be accepted because the evidences submitted were not in form of laws or international conventions violated, but administrative decisions/actions, which could be heard by another competent court.

DGPR believed that the constitutional court had the competence to rule on this case, since, the party has submitted evidences in form of tangible acts done by different Government Institutions violating Article 5 of the Constitution.

The Democratic Green Party of Rwanda will therefore, take this case to the High Court in Kigali.

DGPR believes that the non-respect of article 5 of the constitution negatively affects many educated Rwandans as it denies them a chance of equal treatment as citizens and thus makes them unable to achieve their legal rights as stipulated in Article 16 of the Rwandan Constitution, which states that: ‘All human beings are equal before the law. They shall enjoy, without any discrimination, equal protection of the Law’.

Article 5 of the Rwandan constitution stipulates that Rwanda uses three official languages: Kinyarwanda, French and English, however, many Government institutions such as the National Bank of Rwanda, Rwanda Revenue Authority, National ID Project and many others, have opted to either use English alone or with Kinyarwanda, and deliberately left out French. DGPR finds this a hindrance to the national unity and reconciliation process.

DGPR

{A December 18 UN Security Council resolution has extended the term of office of permanent judges at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) who sit in the Appeals Chamber to enable them conclude cases they are handling and those that may be brought before then soon.}

Turkish national Mehmet Giiney and Tanzanian William H. Sekule have had their terms extended until the end of July next year.

Four other permanent judges—Mandiaye Niang from Senegal, Khalida Rachid Khan from Pakistan, Arlette Ramaroson of Madagascar and Bakhtiyar Tuzmukhamedov of Russia will stay in office up to December 31, 2015 or beyond to finalise assignments.

The ICTR resolution was unanimously adopted Thursday morning. Normally, a draft resolution can only be actualised and implemented when it is formally adopted in the Security Council chamber. It needs nine votes in favor, without veto from the five permanent members.

Olivier Nduhungirehe, Rwanda’s deputy Permanent Representative to the UN, told the new times that the resolution is more technical than substantive as it relates to extension of ICTR judges’ mandates.

“The resolution urged the mechanism that will replace the ICTR to continue monitoring cases of Laurent Bucyibaruta, Wenceslas Munyeshyaka, Jean Uwinkindi and Bernard Munyagishari that were referred to national jurisdictions,” Nduhungirehe said.

“This was requested by Rwanda, as investigations referred to France (Bucyabaruta and Munyashyaka) in 2007 are progressing very slowly”.

Judge Vagn Joensen from Denmark whose term ends this month also gets an extension to December 31, 2015 to carry on the functions required of him as trial judge and president of the tribunal, the same as Hassan Bubacar Jallow , Prosecutor of the ICTR.

Earlier, another UN resolution 1966 (2010) had requested the tribunal to complete its trial and appeals proceedings by December 31, this year and established the International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals, “the Mechanism,” a residual institution set to continue the work of ICTR.

The new resolution urges full cooperation from states, especially those where Genocide fugitives are suspected to be at large, to secure arrest and handover of all fugitives indicted by the tribunal as soon as possible.

As the tribunal winds down, nine high profile fugitives, on whose heads the American government staked a $5 million bounty, remain at large.

They are Felicien Kabuga, Augustin Bizimana, Protais Mpiranya, Fulgence Kayishema, Charles Sikubwabo, Ladislas Ntaganzwa, Pheneas Munyarugarama, Aloys Ndimbati and another only known as Ryandikayo.

If apprehended, three will be tried by the Mechanism.

{{The New Times}}

The Former Minister who was sentenced to 35 years in jail for his involvement in the 1994 genocide saw his sentence lowered to 30 years on appeal Thursday, a UN tribunal said.

The court confirmed Augustin Ngirabatware’s genocide convictions but reversed his conviction for rape as a crime against humanity.

“(The appeal ruling) sets aside the sentence of 35 years of imprisonment and imposes a sentence of 30 years of imprisonment,” Judge Theodor Meron said.

Ngirabatware, planning minister at the time of the 1994 genocide, was in 2012 found guilty of inciting, aiding and encouraging militiamen in his home district of Nyamyumba in northwestern Rwanda to kill their Tutsi neighbours.

His appeal proceedings were handled by the UN-backed Mechanism for International Criminal Tribunals (MICT), charged with taking over the residual cases of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), which is to close its doors in 2015.

Ngirabatware, 57, is the son-in-law of Felicien Kabuga, who is accused by the tribunal of having bankrolled the genocide and is the most notorious of the nine people indicted by the tribunal still at large.

An economist educated in Switzerland, Ngirabatware fled Rwanda in July 1994. He worked in research institutes in Gabon and France before being arrested in Germany in 2007 and transferred to the ICTR a year later. His trail opened in 2009.

Agencies

{The International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) must in theory close its doors on December 31. On November 8, it celebrated twenty years of existence. While the Tribunal’s contribution to fighting impunity is clear, observers point to remaining grey areas of its legacy. These include the failure to prosecute alleged crimes by one of the parties to the 1994 conflict in Rwanda; lack of any mechanism for victim reparations; acquitted persons with nowhere to go; and nine top suspects still on the run.}

The ICTR was set up under UN Security Council Resolution 955, which gave it a mandate to hunt down and bring to justice those most responsible for “genocide and other serious violations of international humanitarian law committed in the territory of Rwanda, and Rwandan citizens responsible for genocide and other such violations committed in the territory of neighbouring States, between 1 January 1994 and 31 December 1994.”

Twenty years on, observers agree on one point: most, if not all the individuals tried by the ICTR would still be free if the international community had not created this Tribunal, based in Arusha, northern Tanzania.

Since its first trial started in 1997, the ICTR has convicted 60 people (of whom seven are still on appeal) and acquitted 14 others accused of having played a leading role in the anti-Tutsi genocide. One witness and one investigator have also been tried and sentenced for contempt of court. Those convicted include former Prime Minister Jean-Kambanda and other members of his government, army generals, businessmen, clergy and members of the media.

But some analysts, like French sociologist André Guichaoua who has testified as an expert in several ICTR trials, think the Tribunal has not fully implemented its mandate. “Choosing to focus on prosecuting and trying the authors of the genocide was justified in the conditions that were those of the ICTR when it was set up, as well as a duty towards the victims and survivors,” he said in a recent interview with Hirondelle News. “But the fact that successive Prosecutors subsequently bowed – with the blessing of the UN Security Council – to the refusal of the military men in power (in Kigali) to have the whole of the Court’s mandate carried out has weakened its credibility and the scope of its judgments, truth telling and most certainly the appeasing of passions and controversies between parties to the conflict,” he said. “So the task given to the ICTR has not been completed,” added Guichaoua, in reference to crimes allegedly perpetrated by members of the RPA, former armed wing of the ex-rebel Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) now in power in Kigali.

Current ICTR Prosecutor Hassan Bubacar Jallow refutes this allegation. At a press conference on November 5 at the Tribunal headquarters, the Gambian lawyer said his team had “never been prevented from investigating” allegations against the RPF. Jallow thus rejected claims that some Western powers, notably the United States, have blocked the “special investigations” started by Swiss former Prosecutor Carla del Ponte, who was Jallow’s predecessor. “We have conducted investigations and concluded that there was a case, the case concerning the killing of (Catholic) bishops” in June 1994 in Kabgayi, central Rwanda, Jallow said.

“Mandate not fulfilled”

Among the 13 clergy killed – almost all Hutus – were three bishops. The case was entrusted to Rwanda by the ICTR Prosecutor. In October 2008, following a trial, a Rwandan court acquitted General Wilson Gumisiriza and Major Wilson Ukwishaka and sentenced the two other co-accused, both of lesser rank, to five years in prison.

But Human Rights Watch (HRW), which says it helped Jallow’s team in this investigation, does not think justice has been done. “The case was not vigorously prosecuted and did not pursue the evidence suggesting a planned military operation ordered by more senior level commanders,” HRW Executive Director Kenneth Roth said in a letter to Jallow on August 14, 2009. “The prosecutor did not pursue more senior commanders who had been involved in the military operation and against whom evidence exists.”

“We continue to believe that your mandate as Chief Prosecutor at the ICTR will not be fulfilled until you pursue all senior commanders responsible for atrocities committed in Rwanda in 1994,” Roth also said in the letter to Jallow.

For genocide survivors, their main criticism of the Tribunal is the absence in its governing texts of any mechanism to provide reparations for victims. This is a criticism not so much of the ICTR itself but of the UN Security Council which set it up. “The ICTR still lacks this important component of reconciliation because it doesn’t have a fund to compensate victims,” said Naphtal Ahishakiye, Secretary General of the main survivors’ organization Ibuka (meaning “Remember” in the Rwandan language), on November 8.

Ibuka President Jean-Pierre Dusingizemungu launched the same appeal on April 10 this year as he was attending a genocide remembrance ceremony at the ICTR’s headquarters. “As we commemorate the 20th anniversary of the genocide, reparations are at the heart of what Ibuka is asking for,” he said. “And we think this is the moment for the (Rwandan) government and the international community to redouble their efforts to put in place a reparation mechanism for victims.”

Whereas the ICTR Statutes do not provide for any reparation or participation mechanism for victims, those of the International Criminal Court (ICC) do. At the ICC, victims have a right to present their observations and question witnesses through their representatives. At the end of a trial, they can ask for reparations for harm suffered. The Rome Statute which founded the ICC also set up a Trust Fund for Victims, which is independent of the Court. “Our recommendation now is that an international Fund be set up for victims,” the Ibuka president concluded.

Three “big fish” still on the run

The Collective of survivors’ associations is also calling for the international community to continue hunting for the nine ICTR accused still on the run so that “the closure of the ICTR does not signal the end of justice”. Six of those still at large have had their cases transferred to Rwanda, which now has the first responsibility to track them down. The three others, including rich businessman Félicien Kabuga said to be the financier of the genocide, will be tried if they are caught by the residual Mechanism for International Criminal Tribunals (MICT). In a press statement on November 8, as the ICTR was celebrating its 20th anniversary, the Security Council called on all member states to “cooperate with the ICTR, the Residual Mechanism, and the Government of Rwanda in the arrests and prosecutions of the remaining nine indicted fugitives”. ICTR Prosecutor Jallow made the same call from Arusha. “The nine fugitives who remain at large (…) need to be arrested and brought to justice,” he said. “This can be done only through the active collaboration of all states to secure the arrest and transfer of these fugitives for trial.”

Billionnaire Félicien Kabuga, accused notably of having ordered the machetes used to kill Tutsis, is believed by the ICTR to be hiding in Kenya, only six hours by road from the seat of the Tribunal in Arusha. The second “big fish”, former Defence Minister Augustin Bizimana, is said to be in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). The third is former presidential guard commander Protais Mpiranya. He was in charge of the élite protection unit of ex-president Juvénal Habyarimana, which was active in the massacres. Mpiranya, who was a commanding member of the FDLR Rwandan Hutu rebels in the eastern DRC, is being protected, according to the ICTR, by senior Zimbabwean officials. However, some Rwandan sources say Bizimana and Mpiranya have died of natural causes. ICTR Prosecutor Jallow contests this.

On another issue, the ICTR recognizes it has had enormous difficulty finding host countries for the people it has acquitted, and for convicted persons who have served their sentences. Of the 14 acquitted so far, only six have found host countries while the others are still in an ICTR “safe house” in Arusha, along with three people who have served their sentences. “I humbly call on all governments present to see how they can assume this international responsibility and agree to host persons acquitted or freed by the ICTR after serving their sentence,” said ICTR Tanzanian Deputy President Mohammed Gharib Bilal at the November 8 ceremony. According to the agreement between Tanzania and the UN, people who have been definitively tried by the ICTR must leave Tanzanian territory.

The fact that acquitted persons cannot leave Tanzania represents a “failure” for the ICTR and a “big human rights challenge”, according to ICTR Registrar Bongani Majola.

AH/JC

{Archbishop Bruno Forte, the secretary of a committee formed by Pope Francis to draft an interim report for the Synod of Bishops, wrote a controversial section on accepting homosexuals, the Associate Press reports.}

During a press conference on the document, Cardinal Peter Erdo, the chairman of the drafting committee, deferred to Archbishop Forte when questions were raised about the section on homosexuality. The Italian prelate was identified by AP as “an Italian theologian known for pushing the pastoral envelope on dealing with people in “irregular” unions while staying true to Catholic doctrine.”

Archbishop Forte evidently introduced his own thoughts into the interim report, which was intended to summarize the ideas expressed by Synod fathers during their general discussions. Father Federico Lombardi, the director of the Vatican press office, told reporters that among more than 250 talks during the plenary sessions of the Synod, only one address focused on the question of homosexuality.

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