UN tribunal's database of genocide suspects ready for use

The United Nations tribunal's database containing files of all the 550,000 known suspects of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda has been complete and is ready for useby various courts during their trials.

The database is a collection of some 87,000 genocide files put together by prosecutors over the last six to seven years, according to Dieter Magsam, head of the project carried out by the German technical assistance company, GTZ, in five years.

The genocide-related database will soon be handed over to prosecutors who will in turn deliver it to Gacacas. Gacacas are community-based, quasi-traditional courts set up in Rwanda to helpspeed up the genocide trials.

The Gacacas were set up three years ago as an alternative to the regular UN court of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), for fear that the trial by the ICTR alone of the 1994 Rwandan genocide would have to take ages to complete.

The Arusha-based UN court has decided to shift some of its scheduled trials to Rwanda, where there will be some 10,000 Gacaca courts throughout the central African country next year when they are to start hearing genocide cases.

Each of these Gacaca courts will receive a manual on how to usethe database which is expected to simplify the work of these localcourts, according to Magsam.

Source: Xinhua