Plans to have prisoners convicted by a United Nations tribunal of genocide serve their sentences in Rwanda, where they committed their crimes in 1994, prompted outrage on Tuesday from defence lawyers.
The Association of Defence Lawyers working at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) said in a statement they oppose ”in the strongest possible terms [current] negotiations between the UN and the regime of [Rwandan President Paul] Kagame”.
”Members of the Kagame regime are suspected of the same crimes over which the UN is prosecuting the ICTR detainees,” the association said in a statement.
Rwanda’s genocide claimed between 800 000 and a million people, most of them from the small Tutsi minority, as part of a systematic campaign by the then Hutu government to wipe out the country’s Tutsis.
Despite ICTR investigations, much less is said openly about the reported reprisal killings of thousands of Hutus by the Tutsi rebels led in 1994 by Kagame.
”The negotiations between the UN and the Kagame regime on the fate of ICTR detainees make the UN directly complicit in the cover-up of the Kagame regime’s crimes,” the laywers’ statement said.
Jailing ICTR convicts in Rwanda would ”place them under the control of people accused of war crimes”, it said.
Rwanda’s representative at the tribunal, Aloys Mutabingwa, called on the lawyers ”to get on with defending the accused instead of resorting to political propaganda”.
He noted that the ICTR’s statutes clearly indicate that its jail terms should be served in Rwanda or in other willing states.
On Monday, an ICTR team began a five-day visit to Rwanda to assess conditions in its jails and to meet Rwandan justice officials.
None of those so far convicted by the ICTR are in Rwandan prisons. Six are detained in Mali. Other countries such as Benin, Swaziland, France, Italy and Sweden have offered their detention facilities to the tribunal. — Sapa-AFP