Transitional Justice Forum

ICTR appeals chamber upholds two acquittals

Posted by Helena Cobban at 10:02 | TrackBack

I just learned over at the blog Opinio Juris that the joint ICTR/ICTY appeals chamber in The Hague has upheld the acquittals that ICTR's trial chamber in Arusha handed down to Andre Ntagerura and Emmanuel Bagambiki.

Kevin Jon Heller, the author of that post, sums up the trial chamber's ruling thus:

The Trial Chamber held – unanimously, as well – that the prosecution had "failed to prove beyond reasonable doubt" that Ntagerura, a former transport minister, and Bagambiki, the former governor of Cyangugu Province, actively participated in the massacres. It also held that Bagambiki could not be held responsible for the acts of soldiers who killed Tutsis, because the prosecution had failed to establish the existence of a superior-subordinate relationship between him and the killers.

Heller writes that the acquittals are "rare events for the ICTR". I'm not sure in what sense he means rare, since ICTR has now acquitted five of the 26 defendants whose cases it has ruled on, and it strikes me that a 19% acquittal rate in an international war-crimes court is not low.

Maybe it's true, though, that for ICTR to arrive at a final ruling on any of its cases remains a fairly rare event! Since it was founded in 1994 ICTR has spent over $1.1 billion of international funds on its extremely expensive operations and produced only those 26 verdicts to date. Per-case processing cost: $42.3 million.

You can get some idea of why the court's costs have ballooned so expansively if you read the reporting I did of my 2003 trip to Arusha, here.

By the way, I also have a fairly iconoclastic article on the value of war-crimes courts coming out in the upcoming (March-April) issue of Foreign Policy. I'll let TJF readers know, obviously, once it comes out. But it's not too soon to join the discussion on that question right now...

Anyway, it's nice to see the work over at Opinio Juris. That post and the others I've looked at seem to be clearly written and studded with useful links where you need them.