• by IPS Correspondents (united nations)
• Tuesday, November 08, 1994
• Inter Press Service

UNITED NATIONS, Nov 08 (IPS) - Despite opposition from Rwanda's new government, the U.N. Security Council Tuesday authorised the creation of an ad hoc tribunal to judge the massacres and genocide which occurred this year in the Central African nation.

Thirteen Council members voted in favour of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, which is to comprise two criminal courts consisting of three judges each and an appeals court of five judges.

The court is authorised to judge the crimes against humanity -- most notably genocide -- that have occurred in Rwanda and its neighbours from Jan 1 to Dec 31 of this year.

The Council has not yet decided where the Tribunal will be based, although there appears to be consensus to hold much of the court proceedings within Rwanda itself.

The resolution said that "an office will be established and proceedings will be conducted in Rwanda, where feasible and appropriate," although another trial venue -- possibly the Hague in the Netherlands -- may be selected later.

The new tribunal will share many of the same facilities as a similar one which is currently prepared to try war crimes in the former Yugoslavia. South African Justice Richard Goldstone, the prosecutor for the Yugoslav tribunal, will also prosecute the charges of crimes against humanity in Rwanda, and the appeals chamber for both tribunals will be the same.

As many as one million Rwandans, including a large segment of the nation's Tutsi minority, have been killed since April in what U.N. and human rights monitors have argued was a systematic campaign of extermination by the former Hutu-majority regime.

Despite the level of atrocities, the new Rwandan government, led by the multi-ethnic Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), voted against the Tribunal in Tuesday's vote. (China, one of five veto- wielding Council members, abstained in opposition to the principle of creating any international war crimes tribunal.)

Rwandan Ambassador Manzi Bakuramutsa objected to the Tribunal's inability, under the statute approved by the Council, to impose the death penalty against any suspects found guilty of planning genocide.

"It is impossible to build a state of law if we don't eradicate the culture of impunity" which has prevented punishment against war crimes throughout the rule of President Juvenal Habyarimana, who died in a plane crash on Apr 7, he said. The crash set off the killings.

© Inter Press Service (2014) — All Rights Reserved. Original source: Inter Press Service

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