Never before in the history of international justice has a mass crime been judged so much or in so many places as the 1994 genocide in Rwanda against the Tutsis. Rwanda set up more than 12,000 courts to ensure that no one would escape their share of responsibility. More than one million individuals were tried there. An international tribunal set up by the United Nations has helped prosecute ringleaders, while Western countries have also conducted some symbolic trials. And the task is not complete.<\/p>\n
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When the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) took power in Kigali in July 1994, the judicial system no longer existed. Most of the country\u2019s magistrates had been killed or fled into exile. There were no longer any gendarmes, judicial police or judicial structures. A few weeks later, the communal lock-ups, prisons and other improvised detention centres were overflowing with tens of thousands of people accused of participating in the genocide that left between 600,000 and 1 million people dead between April and July 1994, according to different estimates.<\/p>\n
Two years later, Rwanda published the \"Organic Law of 30 August 1996 on the organization of prosecution of offences constituting the crime of genocide or crimes against humanity committed between 1 October 1990 and 31 December 1994\". It thus gave itself a broader temporal jurisdiction than that of the UN\u2019s International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) set up after the genocide, which covered only the period from January 1 to December 31, 1994.<\/p>\n