Ottawa seems unwilling to recognize the verdicts of the Rwandan genocide tribunal by allowing family reunification after acquittals, a lawyer says
the former Rwandan foreign minister Jerome Bicamumpaka pleaded for permission to be reunited with his wife and children in Montreal.of cancer at the age of 64, stateless and exiled in East Africa. Then at last they relented: They allowed his body to be flown to Canada, in a coffin.
Despite its heavy financial investment in the tribunal, however, Ottawa seems unwilling to recognize the legitimacy of its verdicts by allowing family reunification after acquittals,The United Nations tribunal has convicted 61 people for crimes relating to the genocide, in which an estimated 800,000 mostly Tutsi people were killed.
They say the unofficial imprisonment is not only illegal but also a breach of UN promises that the Rwanda crimes tribunal would not become a form of “victor’s justice” to be meted out to the losers of Rwanda’s wars.Grâce Uwase Zigiranyirazo, daughter of Protais Zigiranyirazo, an 84-year-old Rwandan who was acquitted by the international tribunal in 2009 and is now among those under house arrest.
The tribunal’s successor agency, the International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals , has sharply criticized Niger’s refusal to honour the agreement that it signed with the UN last November. In a letter to the UN Security Council, IRMCT president Carmel Agius said he was “deeply troubled” by Niger’s violation of the agreement and the “potentially severe impact” on the human rights of the Rwandans. The notion that a UN member state “could seek to disregard a recently concluded agreement with the United Nations is distressing and cannot be allowed to stand as a precedent,” he said.
“We feel that our parents are stuck in the middle of something we don’t really understand,” said Diane Ashimwe, daughter of one of the acquitted Rwandan men, François-Xavier Nzuwonemeye. He applied for a Rwandan passport in Tanzania, but the Rwandan embassy told him he must apply in Rwanda – a move that would put him at risk of further prosecution and imprisonment, since the Rwandan government and state-controlled media have made it clear that they don’t accept the tribunal’s acquittals. Rwanda has a long track record of jailing and even killing its opponents, with many cases documented by human-rights groups.
Mr. Bicamumpaka, an economist by profession and a member of an opposition party, joined Rwanda’s interim government as foreign minister in April, 1994, after the genocide had begun. He served in the post for three months, until the government was defeated by Mr. Kagame’s invading army in July.
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