17.03.07 - ICTR/MANDATE - THE ICTR ENGAGES IN A DEBATE ON ITS POST MANDATE-FUTURE

Arusha, March 17, 2007 (FH) – The International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), which must end all trials before Trial Chamber by 2008, and all appeals trials by 2010, is currently debating steps to take after the end of hits mandate for the preservation of its heritage. “This tribunal is the first to have judged the crime of genocide. This is shared knowledge that is necessary to continue to promote the fight against impunity,” the Chief of the Registry, the Senegalese Adama Dieng, explained to the Hirondelle Agency. “We have engaged this reflection in cooperation with the Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia: we will very soon submit our report to the Department of Judicial Affairs (of the UN),” he continued. According to Dieng, the current debate specifically centers on the conservation of archives, “the residual juridical mechanisms” relating to, among other things, the eventual requests for the revisions of sentences, to the future of those sentenced who will finish their sentences after the end of the mandate. Concerning the archives, the representative of Rwanda to the ICTR, Aloys Mutabingwa lastly told the Hirondelle Agency that his government hoped to be the repository of documents. The Chief of the ICTR Registry, without explicitly endorsing Rwanda’s request, is of the opinion that the archives should be “as close as possible to the victims.” The mayor of The Hague, in the Netherlands, has hoped to open a museum where the archives of all the international criminal tribunals could be conserved. “It is up to the Untied Nations to decide,” Dieng declared, assuring that the concerned countries, specifically Rwanda, should be “fully associated” with the process.In light of perpetuating the ICTR’s heritage, Mr. Dieng hopes that the Umusanzu center opened by the Tribunal in Kigali and notably holding a library would be reinforced after the mandate to be a “veritable center of fight against impunity: a large center of radiance in the Great Lakes Region” of Africa. Created by a Security Council resolution in November 1994, the ICTR, based in Arusha, Tanzania, and which opened its first trial in 1997, has currently pronounced 28 guilty verdicts and 5 acquittals. Twenty-seven accused are on trial, 9 are awaiting trial while 18, including the alleged financier of the genocide, Felicien Kabuga, are at large. ER/PB/KD © Hirondelle News Agency