Local genocide courts in Rwanda operational next January

More than 8,000 local courts are expected to be put into operation in Rwanda next January to help facilitate the trials of genocide suspects of the country's 1994 massacre.

Rwanda has set January 15 as the date for starting the operation of the country's Gacacas, community-based, quasi-traditional courts set up to help speed up the genocide trials, according to Augustin Nkusi, director of judicial services in the Rwandan National Gacaca Department.

The Rwandan official was quoted by local press reports as saying in the northern Tanzanian city of Arusha that even though there were previous postponements of the Gacacas, "up to now there are no reason to change this date" in that the training of judges has been completed in most places.

Previous dates set for the start of the operation of Gacacas had been changed several times due to various reasons.

The trials in these Gacacas will be facilitated by the provision of a database that contains files of all the 550,000 known suspects of the 1994 massacre in Rwanda in some 87,000 genocide files put together by prosecutors over the last six to seven years.

The database, compiled by the German technical assistance company, GTZ in five years, are scheduled to be handed out to the Rwandan local courts. The Gacacas were set up three years ago as an alternative to the regular United Nations 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 they will be heard in the Gacaca courts throughout the country.

Source: Xinhua