{The International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), to which the United Nations Security Council had given until the end of next year to complete all of its trials, will not be able to meet this deadline, judicial sources told APA on Friday.}
Set up by the November 1994 resolution of the Security Council, the ICTR was commissioned to search and try those responsible for the 1994 Tutsi genocide.
After completing all these court cases in first instance, the ICTR is currently working on the last appeals, especially in the trial of the former Family and Women’s Promotion Minister Pauline Nyiramashuko who has been standing trial along with five other people, including her son Arsene Shalom Ntahobali.
Mrs. Nyiramasuhuko, the only woman detained by the Tribunal is also the only woman to have been charged for genocide by an international tribunal.
According to the report read on Friday on Tribunal’s website, the decision of the ICTR Appeals Chamber in this case, which is one of the most important in the history of ICTR should be made in July 2015.
According to the same report, this delay is mainly caused by the time need to make the indispensable translation work of some of the court documents.
The judgment of first instance, condemning Nyiramasuhuko and her son for life, was made on June 24, 2011.
That day, the presiding judge only read a summary of the judgment in English. The whole text, a 1,500-page document in English came out three weeks later.
The Appeals Chamber was composed of two anglophone judges and one francophone judge. Yet, the six convicted criminals who do not have a good command of English needed a French version of the text, to duly prepare for their grounds of appeal.
The French version was handed out to them only in February 2013
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