Introduction

N. Huls¹

In this chapter, I touch upon some of the themes that are close to Jan Michiel's academic heart, i.e., real legal certainty, rule of law building in post-conflict societies, and the role of traditional legal values in the law of developing countries.

I will argue that the international standards (dedere autjudicare, extradite or adjudicate) to handle Rwandan genocide cases have become too complex to produce legal certainty. Consequently, Western governments look for alternatives. Many Western jurisdictions are concerned about the kind of justice that Rwanda renders. Based on my own working experience in Rwanda and a socio-legal analysis of a few recent court battles, I formulate a possible way out of the legal swamp that has been created.

In 1918, Rwanda became a protectorate of Belgium. Originally, the Belgians supported the Tutsi elite, which constituted 15 percent of the population. However, after the democratisation wave in Africa of the 1960s, they changed their political support to the Hutu majority. After independence in 1962, many Tutsi had to flee the country because of violent actions against them.

The 1990s political turbulence in Rwanda led the United Nations to organise peace talks in Arusha, Tanzania, between the Habyarimana government and the Tutsi rebels. The opposing parties reached a kind of agreement about power-sharing. But this process was interrupted on April 6, 1994, when the plane of President Habyarimana was shot down near his palace in Kigali, Rwanda's capital.

On April 6, the Rwandan genocide began, which lasted one hundred days (Des Forges 1999). In a very short period, hundreds of thousands of people were slaughtered, most of them Tutsi but also moderate Hutus. The Rwandan Patriotic Army (RPA) stopped the genocide. They were the army of the Tutsi rebels that had invaded Rwanda from Uganda in 1990.

In this article, I will focus on some legal complexities in the adjudication of genocide suspects during the aftermath of this tragedy. In the first section, I start with the legal responses in Rwanda itself via ordinary courts and via community justice (gacaca). I then turn to the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) and the role of the international community.

In the next section, I compare two recent extradition cases. High courts in the Netherlands and the UK reached opposite results, although both courts had access to the same expert reports of a Dutch prosecutor, Martin Witteveen, who had observed genocide court cases in Rwanda.

In the third section, I make a political analysis of the legal aftermath of the 1994 genocide where foreign courts have become opaque arenas for the Government of Rwanda (GoR) and its political adversaries in the diaspora.

In the fourth section, I assess the legal complexities in the developed legal systems of the West. I see a gloomy picture of legal uncertainty that makes these cases almost unmanageable and the outcomes unpredictable. This uncertainty leads to some undesirable consequences.

Finally, I argue that the GoR must make efforts to ensure that fair genocide trials can take place in Rwanda and I mention the steps that the GoR should take.