INDEPTH: WAR CRIMES
Rwanda
CBC News Online | 2004
Most of Madam Justice Arbour's time at the initial War Crimes Tribunbal was taken up by the Balkan atrocities. But she was also responsible for overseeing a separate UN tribunal set up in 1994 to prosecute war crimes in Rwanda.
Up to 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus were systematically slaughtered in a three-month campaign of terror that began in the small central African country on April 6, 1994.
Most of the killing was carried out by a well-organized force of 8,000 extremist Hutus.
The tribunal - based in Arusha, northern Tanzania - delivered its first genocide conviction in September 1998, ruling in the case of Jean-Paul Akayesu, a former mayor accused of inciting the murder of 2,000 Tutsis.
With that decision, the tribunal became the first international court to hand down a conviction for genocide.
It was also the first to rule that sexual crimes are acts of genocide when committed with the intent of destroying an ethnic, racial, national or religious group.
Other than that historic ruling - and a guilty plea from a former Rwandan prime minister in another case - the progress in Arusha was even more painfully slow than in The Hague.
While the UN tribunal was dogged by administrative delays and inertia, a speedier and rougher kind of justice is at work in the Rwandan judicial system itself.
More than 125,000 men, women and children in Rwanda faced trial on charges stemming from the genocide. Rwandan courts sentenced more than 100 people to death.
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