COURIER ONLINE

THE STANLEY FOUNDATION

Resources
Conference report(s):
"Report of the Fortieth Strategy for Peace, US Foreign Policy Conference"
Acrobat PDF

Common Ground
radio program(s):
"The Disappeared/Rwandan Justice"
Transcript
RealAudio

"Architects of Justice"
Transcript
RealAudio

Up to one million people were killed in the 1994 Rwandan genocide. Experts say there are at least 100,000 to 150,000 potential defendants in the criminal cases surrounding the genocide. Neil Kritz, senior scholar on the rule of law at the US Institute of Peace, recently appeared on the Stanley Foundation's radio program, Common Ground, to discuss a unique approach to dealing with the judicial backlog.

Neil Kritz: The Rwandan government and the Rwandan society is embarking on a new experiment...that would transfer the overwhelming majority of these [less serious] cases out of the court system to a series of 10,000 or so locally elected Gacaca panels. These are panels based loosely on a traditional Rwandan dispute resolution mechanism in which elders of the community would gather together the village to resolve a dispute between different parties.

These panels—down to the lowest cell level in Rwandan society, which in some instances may be as small as a school, or a church, or a small community—would elect its own panel of people who, according to the proposals, would be required to be known for their integrity, objectivity, lack of bias, upstanding character, etc. The individuals, rather than being brought before the courts, would be brought before these Gacaca tribunals, which would assemble the local village, or the local community, for an airing of the case.

The logic of this is to engage the local community in the process of establishing the facts: who was killed in the local village, who participated in the crimes in question, as well as establishing the penalties.