gavel.
A top French appeals court is to rule Wednesday on
whether alleged Rwandan genocide financier Felicien Kabuga will
stand trial in France or face a UN tribunal in
Tanzania.
Kabuga, who is 84 according to officials but claims to be 87,
was arrested in May at his home outside Paris after 25 years on the
run.
The 1994 Rwanda genocide of some 800,000 people by Hutu
extremists targeted rival Tutsis as well as also moderate
Hutus.
Once one of Rwanda’s richest men, Kabuga is alleged to have
funnelled money to militia groups as chairman of the national
defence fund.
He is also accused of setting up the Interahamwe militia that
carried out massacres as well as the Radio-Television Libre des
Mille Collines whose broadcasts incited people to murder.
A French court ruled in June that Kabuga should stand trial at
the Mechanism for International Criminal Tribunals (MICT) based in
Arusha, Tanzania.
But his lawyers appealed, citing frail health and fears the UN
tribunal in Africa would be biased.
During a hearing at France’s supreme court for criminal cases,
the Cour de Cassation, Kabuga’s lawyer Louis Bore also argued that
his client could not receive proper medical treatment in
Tanzania.
Kabuga has diabetes, high blood pressure and leukoaraiosis, an
incurable illness that erodes physical and cognitive abilities,
Bore said.
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Kabuga was moved from his cell at the end of last week for
“medical reasons,” several sources told AFP.
If the appeals court endorses his transfer, Kabuga would have
one month to appear before the MICT, which took over the duties of
the UN’s International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) when it
formally closed in 2015.
The ICTR handed down dozens of prison sentences over the years
on genocide and other charges, including life sentences. It also
acquitted some suspects.
Kabuga was indicted by the tribunal in 1997 on seven counts,
including genocide. He denies all the charges.
Rwanda has said it wants to see Kabuga tried by its own courts,
but transferring jurisdiction away from the UN tribunal in Tanzania
would require a decision by the UN Security Council, according to
Serge Brammertz, a prosecutor for the MICT.
Rwanda itself carried out 22 executions of people convicted for
their role in the conflict before abolishing the death penalty in
2007, a move that facilitated the extradition of suspects from
other countries to Rwanda.
Between 2005 and 2012, some 12,000 popular tribunals know as
“gacaca” tried close to two million people, convicting two-thirds
of them.
European courts have also tried and sentenced Rwandan genocide
suspects, notably Belgium and France.
-AFP
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