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Print This PageThe 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.
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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, but we’ll have to wait and see. By comparison, in one year (2005), the top 25 CEOs in the state of California earned a combined $1.32 billion. Bill Gates is able to give away more $1 billion on an annual basis. Perhaps we could convince him and/or a few of the other world’s billionaires to help defray the cost of international criminal justice.
I would hesitate in drawing too many conclusions about the ‘effectiveness of international criminal justice’ from this one instance, i.e., based on the estimated costs of this particular tribunal (poor judgments notoriously arise when we examine cases in isolation). Why? Well, we might consider Jon Elster’s extraction of the methodological principles Tocqueville used to evaluate the social consequences of American institutions in Sour Grapes: studies in the subversion of rationality (1983):
1. ‘One must look at the consequences that emerge when the institution in question is widely used rather than marginal.’ [the ICC over time, say, rather than simply the ICTR]
2. ‘Any given institution will have many consequences, some of them opposed in their tendency. It is imperative, therefore, to look at their net effect.’ [in this case, the net effect may have to be assessed long after the ICTR has closed in 2008]
3. ‘One should not evaluate a given institution or constitution according to its efficiency at each moment of time, but rather look at the long-term consequences.’ Elster uses this example: ‘Democracies tax more heavily, but also create more taxable income.’
4. ‘One should not confuse the transitional effect of introducing an institution with the steady-state effect of having it.’ [the point I made with regard to the ICTR vis-a-vis the ICC above]
5. ‘The four principles just indicated can only be applied after the fact, to trace the consequences of a system that has been in operation for some time.’ As Elster states in a note, ‘it will not do to argue with Edmund Burke or [Karl] Popper that trial-and-error or piecemeal social engineering can be a substitute for well-founded prediction, since these methods fail to respect principles 1. through 4. By requiring initial and local viability of institutional reform, the incremental method neglects the fact that institutions which are viable in the large and in the long term may not be so in the small and in the short term. This is, in fact, the main objection that Tocqueville makes to Burke’s evaluation of the French Revolution.’ [emphasis added]
I think these methodological principles have some application in the assessment of the ad hoc tribunals and the ICC itself.
Perhaps those who commented on Julian’s prior post on ‘the unhelpful international criminal court’ will have other points to make here as well!
at 10:02 am EST Patrick S. O'Donnell
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).
at 7:30 pm EST Patrick S. O'Donnell