Rwandan Human Rights Activist Convicted by Gacaca Court

Last week, I discussed the disturbing case of Francois Xavier-Byuma, a senior official with a Rwandan human-rights group who had been arrested and accused of complicity in the 1994 genocide. As I noted in that post, the accusations were leveled by a gacaca judge whom Byuma had been investigating in connection with the rape of a young girl.

The situation became even worse today. That same judge has now convicted Byuma and sentenced him to 19 years in prison:

Francois-Xavier Byuma, a member of the Rwandan League for the Promotion and Defence of Human Rights, was sentenced Sunday by a grassroots genocide court for colluding with criminals and beating and injuring a woman during the 100-day killing spree.

“Byuma has been sentenced to 19 years in prison,” said Jean Paul Tulindwanamungu, a senior official of the rights group.

Byuma, also head of a children’s rights group, had previously accused the judge who handed him the sentence of raping a young girl.

“This is not a trial, it is a settling of scores just like we see all over the country,” one of his colleagues told AFP on condition of anonymity.

Byuma, who is also a popular playwright, said he would appeal the sentence.

We can only hope that Byuma’s appeal will be successful. The rules of the gacaca courts — to say nothing of simple fairness — should have prevented the judge Byuma was investigating from presiding over his trial:

The gacaca legislation states that gacaca judges are excluded from cases wherein they are friends or an enemy of the defendant, the defendant’s guardian or are related to the defendant (Article 16). The legislation further stipulates a number of criteria that can lead to the replacement of any member of a gacaca organ upon the demand of other members of that organ (Article 12).

Unfortunately, in terms of due process, the gacaca appeals system is no less flawed than the gacaca trials themselves, even for Category II defendants who — like Byuma — are entitled to judicial review of their convictions:

The Gacaca Courts do have an extremely limited judicial review in the form of the right to appeal by the defendants in a small number of cases. However, the court system in general suffers from a serious deficiency of any form of functional judicial review of outcomes and certainly no formal review of process. The Gacaca Court system plan does not include review by regular Rwandan courts at any level.

[snip]

No defendant is permitted to appeal a verdict to an ordinary criminal court. This is particularly problematic in the case of category-two defendants, some of whom are subject to severe sentences involving long prison terms.

In reality, the Gacaca appeals court, which was supposed to function at the sector level, does not. There is a lack of trained judges and resources to make the courts functional. While there have been a few cases of appeals by category-two defendants, these are the exception, and the appeals process is by no means working at the level at which it was designed to function.

More as Byuma’s appeal moves forward.