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54 German Y.B. Int'l L. 671 (2011)
Universal Jurisdiction in Germany: The Trial of Onesphore R. before the Higher Regional Court of Frankfurt

handle is hein.journals/gyil54 and id is 672 raw text is: 










   Universal Jurisdiction in Germany: The Trial of Onesphore R.
           Before the Higher Regional Court of Frankfurt

                              PATRICK KROKER



   Since January 2011 Onesphore R. has been standing trial before the Higher Re-
gional Court of Frankfurt (Oberlandesgericht Frankfurt) for alleged participation in
several killings during the Rwandan genocide in 1994. The city of Frankfurt has a rich
history of international criminal law, as it hosted the 'Auschwitz-trials' in the 1960s,
pushed for by the famous former Hessian chief prosecutor Fritz Bauer. The trial
against R., however, is the first trial to take place in Germany for crimes committed
on the African continent.

   From 1988 onwards, OnesphoreR. was the mayor of a Rwandan community called
Muvumba in northeast Rwanda. In 1990, in the course of the civil war, R. fled with
the citizens of his community from the advancing Tutsi-rebels of the Rwandan
Patriotic Front (RPF), led by Rwanda's present president PaulKagame. The commu-
nity re-settled in refugee camps in and around the Murambi commune, then gov-
erned byJean-Baptiste Gatete, who is appealing his sentence of life imprisonment
from the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) for his role in the
1994 genocide.1 The Federal Prosecutor General (Generalbundesanwalt) accuses R.
of having instigated and participated in several mass killings of Tutsi in this commune
during the first half of April 1994, constituting genocide.2

    Doctoral Candidate at the University of Hamburg and Law Clerk at the Higher Regional Court of Berlin.
    ICTR, Trial Chamber, The Prosecutor v. Jean -Baptiste Gatete, ICTR-2000-61-T, Judgment of
31 March 2011, available at: http://www.unictr.org/Portals/O/Case/English/Gatete/judgement/110
331 .pdf (accessed on 30 November 2011).
   2 Originally, the indictment named three massacres in which the accused allegedly had participated.
In the course of the proceedings, however, the chamber modified the charges. Following a proposal by
the Federal Public Prosecutor it abandoned the eximanation of two of these massacres because it seemed

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