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The International Center for Transitional Justice (ICTJ) assists countries pursuing accountability for past mass atrocity or human rights abuse. More
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Transitions
TJ News and Analysis from around the World
Under the Lens
A View on Rwanda: an interview with Eugenia Zorbas
Eugenia Zorbas, a doctoral candidate at the Development Studies Institute of the London School of Economics, wrote her thesis on transitional justice issues in post-genocide Rwanda. She worked in Rwanda for UNHCR in 2002-03 before returning to conduct fieldwork there in 2005. Zorbas will take up a position with MONUC (UN Mission in the Democratic Republic of Congo) in the political affairs division in December 2007. She recently sat down with the ICTJ to share her observations about transitional justice topics in Rwanda.
Q: Do you think Rwanda provides any general lessons that can be applied to its neighbors? How have they handled the aftermath of the genocide politically? Can we draw any lessons from the dynamics that helped create that crisis?
Eugenia Zorbas: You can't make very big generalizations. It is distinct, totally different from Burundi or the Congo. Some of the things the government is attempting are quite novel and forward-looking. They might work, except that they are always hijacked by the fact that the government is extremely authoritarian. There is only one version of events that the government, usually described as Tutsi-controlled, can consider without totally undermining its own legitimacy: It hides the role the then-rebels played in the civil war that culminated in the 1994 genocide. They also perpetrated human rights abuses in Rwanda and Congo before, during, and after the genocide. So, many people see the leaders of the present government in Kigali as war criminals themselves...
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Call for Applications | Essentials Course NYC
The ICTJ, in association with NYU School of Law, is pleased to announce the next edition of the New York City-based Essentials Course: a 3-day intensive course on Transitional Justice.
On February 25-27, 2008, the seminar will be held at the Greentree Estate, formerly the Whitney family home for nearly one hundred years. The Greentree Estate is an exclusive venue with 400 acres of rolling hills, gardens and woodlands on the outskirts of New York City. It is used by the United Nations Secretary General and various UN agency heads for retreats and high-level meetings.
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Transitional Justice in The News
The prosecutor of International Criminal Court (ICC) has ruled out suspension of arrest warrants for leaders of the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA), the Ugandan rebel group. In 2005 the ICC indicted five LRA leaders, including its commander, Joseph Kony, and his deputy, Vincent Otti. The five are charged with war crimes and crimes against humanity including murder, rape, and enslavement of children. Two, including Vincent Otti, are now presumed dead. Their 20-year insurgency has killed tens of thousands of people and internally displaced 1.7 million.
The Liberian Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) has announced it will begin public hearings January 8, 2008, on crimes committed during two decades of armed conflict. TRC Chairman Jerome Verdier said the hearings would provide a venue for victims and alleged perpetrators to recount their experiences for the public record as a gesture toward reconciliation. According to Verdier the Commission will pay particular attention to violence involving women and children during the conflict. The TRC was launched in June 2006 and has a two-year mandate to complete its truth-seeking work.
The German government has rejected Israel-based Holocaust survivors' appeal that it increase reparations established in 1952. Victims' groups have argued that the original reparations agreement-setting up pensions-did not account for survivors' unexpected longevity. Nor did it cover about a third of Israeli survivors who had escaped Nazi rule by fleeing to the Soviet Union. Following its initial response the German government said it would be willing to discuss additional payments if the Israeli government made a formal request. Six million Jews were killed in the Holocaust, and hundreds of thousands of survivors migrated to Israel in 1948.
Forensic teams have completed exhumation of more than 600 bodies of Bosnian Muslims killed by Serbian forces at Srebrenica, eastern Bosnia. This was the ninth mass grave discovered in the village of Kamenica, north of the site of the Srebrenica massacre, Europe's worst mass killing since World War II. This latest site is a "secondary mass grave" because the remains had been moved from an original burial site in an attempt to cover up crimes. In July 1995 Serb troops besieged Srebrenica, which had been declared a UN "safe zone," and killed some 8,000 Muslim men and boys.
The International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), mandated to try suspects in Rwanda's 1994 genocide, has announced it will not meet its deadline to complete all remaining cases before the end of 2008 because of the cases' complexity. The Arusha, Tanzania-based court is responsible for prosecuting the architects of the genocide, in which Hutus killed an estimated 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Tutsis in 100 days. The ICTR has decided 37 of 76 cases thus far. Twenty-nine perpetrators have been sentenced, five acquitted, and the rest remain on trial.
The UN Security Council appointed Serge Brammertz prosecutor of the Hague-based International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY). Brammertz will take over from Carla del Ponte on January 1, 2008. The Security Council's 15 members unanimously approved his appointment. The Belgian lawyer currently leads the UN commission investigating the murder of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri. Before working on the Hariri investigation, Brammertz served as deputy chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague. Del Ponte welcomed his appointment as her successor. She will serve as Switzerland's ambassador to Argentina after departing the ICTY.
The Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC), a UN-backed genocide tribunal, rejected a former Khmer Rouge leader's appeal for release on bail. Defense lawyers for Kaing Guek Eav, known as Duch, said their client's rights had been violated during eight years in jail without trial. A judicial panel ordered Duch to remain detained because he could be in danger if released. Charged with crimes against humanity, Duch may be tried in mid-2008. Cambodia and the UN established the Tribunal in 2003 to try top Khmer Rouge leaders for orchestrating 1.7 million people's deaths from 1975 to 1979.
The chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC), Luis Moreno Ocampo, announced he is opening two more investigations in Darfur. One will examine Sudanese government officials for alleged attacks against 2.5 million civilians forced into camps; the other will target attackers of humanitarian workers and U.N. peacekeepers. Ocampo urged the UN Security Council to press Sudan to surrender its acting humanitarian minister, Ahmed Muhammad Harun, against whom the ICC has issued an arrest warrant for crimes against humanity in Darfur. The conflict there has claimed more than 200,000 lives and resulted in displacement of some 2 million people since 2003.
The trial against former Peruvian President Alberto Fujimori on charges of using a death squad to kill leftist guerrillas and collaborators began December 10th in Lima, Peru. Fujimori is charged with authorizing a death squad to kill nine students and a professor at La Cantuta University in 1992, and 15 people in an apartment in the Barrios Altos neighborhood in Lima in 1991. This is the first time in the country's history that a former president faces a public trial for crimes committed during his administration. He could face up to 30 years in prison and a fine of $33 million.
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