Will ICTR miss closure date?

Arusha.The International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) which is now in its completion phase, may not meet the December 2014 deadline to wind up its activities, it was learnt here this week.

The deadline was put in place by the United Nations which set up the tribunal in 1994 to indict and prosecute suspects of the Rwanda genocide, in which over 800,000 people were massacred.

Sources close to ICTR say although it was through with trials in the lower court, it was now handling its last appeals which included the only woman to be charged with genocide before an international court.

She is former Family Affairs minister Pauline Nyiramashuko, her son Arsène Shalom Ntahobali and four others. The former minister is also the only woman held by the ICTR.

According to a report on the ICTR website, the Appeals Chamber decision in the complicated and important joint case “is expected to be delivered in July 2015”.

The report attributes the delay mainly to the need for translations of certain legal documents. Nyiramasuhuko and her son were sentenced to life imprisonment by the lower court on June 24, 2011.

That day, the judge read out only a summary in English of the judgment. The full text, 1,500 pages in English, came out three weeks later. The Chamber was made up of two English-speaking judges and one French-speaking judge.

However, the six convicts did not understand English and needed a French translation to prepare their appeals arguments. They only got this in February this year.

The tribunal registry currently indicates that all the appeals have now been filed, but it is possible that one or other of the convicts may file a request for authorisation to bring additional evidence for the appeal.

The Appeals Chamber has to read all the documents before it sets the date for oral hearings. A judge hearing the case was recently quoted as saying that he did not expect the appeals hearings to take place before mid 2014.

The ICTR Appeals Chamber is also handling four other cases involving a total of nine individuals, civilians and army officers, who were all convicted by the lower court.

It hopes to deliver its judgments by December 31, 2014. Those who were sentenced in the lower court, but have since appealed, included senior officials of ex-president Juvenal Habyarimana whose assassination triggered the genocide.