Gacaca Courts versus the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda and National Courts

The magnitude and the nature of the human rights violations that engulfed Rwanda in 1994 prompted both the Rwandan government and the international community to establish different accountability mechanisms in order to hold perpetrators accountable. At the international level, the UN established the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) to try those bearing the greatest responsibility, the Rwandan national courts were to deal with so-called category one offenders, whereas Gacaca courts initially handled the bulk of cases that could not be handled by the ICTR and national courts (so-called category two and three perpetrators). Therefore, Rwanda offers a unique opportunity to analyse the interplay of criminal justice systems on different levels. Against this background, the study, which is divided into seven chapters, engages in disentangling the conflicting as well as overlapping elements the three justice mechanisms entail.

Despite the already existing scholarship on this topic, the book offers new insights into the domestic case law of Rwanda which is under researched in comparison to the work of the ICTR. With this it adds a valuable new perspective to the international debate from the viewpoint of a Rwandan legal scholar.

This work is supported by DAAD.