30 May The Rwandan Backlash Against the ICTR
As Kevin has noted, the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda has annoyed the current government of Rwanda in a variety of cases, most recently from its decision to plea bargain a defendant charged with genocide. This recent commentary from East Africa (HT: War Crimes Prosecution Watch) sums up some of the local frustration with the ICTR, which is planning to close up shop in 2008 having spent $1 billion dollars on the prosecution of (maybe) 100 defendants (that’s $10 million per defendant!). Key graf:
The frustrations of Rwanda’s Special Representative to the tribunal in Arusha can perhaps be understood when he recently showed concern about the reclassification of inmates, arguing that the “tribunal has transcended its powers by grading them into high, middle and low-ranking genocide suspects.” He further asserts that this contravenes Resolution 955 of the United Nations Security Council which set up the court. He argues that, “initially, the court had a mandate to try all the architects of the genocide, whose original number was 700, but later, without any official communication, it was reduced to 300 and now they are talking of less than 100.”
The ICTR has not been a shining example of the efficiency or effectiveness of international criminal justice. It is certainly in danger of losing the faith of its most important audience – the people of Rwanda.
A bit more information: The figure of $1 billion is a high-end figure by the year 2007 (hence from 1995-2007). That’s a little less than $100 million/yr. ‘Some 1,000 people from 85 countries man the UN court that has three trial chambers, a prosecutor’s office and a registrar’s office.’ In addition, members of the defense teams are on the payroll, ‘as part of the free legal aid allocated to all the detainees.’ Well, you can start to do the math, which would be the salaries for 1,000+ (the ‘+’ being the defense teams) and the other administrative expenses. Put this way, the figure, while still high, seems less exorbitant than the calculation per defendant. And we might ask ourselves: should we not have had the ICTR? In asking this question I suppose we would have to let considerations of justice in some measure outweigh efficiency calculations sensu stricto (and so I trust this will not be viewed as an (irrational) honoring of a sunk cost; in any case, the costs may be ‘on screen,’ and the benefits ‘off screen’). I would suspect the costs of the ICC over time will be less than that of the ad hoc criminal tribunals,… Read more »
Incidentally, I should have made it clear above that I don’t think the ICTR is beyond reproach, that plenty of mistakes have been made, that there are lessons to be learned, etc. Although I might quibble here or there with some of their comments, and their assessment is prior to the tribunal’s completion of its tasks, a chapter by Alison Des Forges and Timothy Longman documents some of the (especially early) problems with the ICTR, not all of which can be attributed to the prosecutor’s office: ‘Legal Response to Genocide in Rwanda,’ in Eric Stover and Harvey M. Weinstein, eds., My Neighbor, My Enemy: Justice and Community in the Aftermath of Atrocity (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 49-68. Of course there’s other articles and books on the ICTR but I haven’t read them all (yet).