The Impunity Gap of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda: Causes and Consequences
![handle is hein.journals/hasint34 and id is 57 raw text is: The Impunity Gap of the International
Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda: Causes
and Consequences
By LESLIE HASKELL AND LARS WALDORF*
To insist on the right to justice for all victims, as did the [1994] U.N.
Commission of Experts, is not to deny the genocide, nor does such
an insistence equate war crimes with genocide; it simply asserts that
all victims, regardless of their affiliation, regardless of the nature of
the crime committed against them, and regardless of the affiliation
of the perpetrator, must have equal opportunity to seek redress for
the wrongs done them.'
I. Introduction
In three short months between April and July 1994, Rwanda
experienced a genocide that killed nearly three-quarters of the Tutsi
minority and thousands of Hutu who opposed the genocide or were
mistaken for Tutsi.2 In total, the genocide claimed the lives of more
than half a million people. The extreme brutality was led by a group
of Hutu extremists within the government and executed by the
national army, local militia groups, and ordinary citizens urged to kill
by the government.
. Leslie Haskell is a Rwanda Researcher at Human Rights Watch and former
legal officer at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. Lars Waldorf is a
Senior Lecturer in International Human Rights Law at the Centre for Applied
Human Rights and York Law School. We are grateful to Kenneth Roth and Aisling
Reidy of Human Rights Watch, Jennifer Trahan, Victor Peskin, and Roger Des
Forges for insightful comments on earlier versions of this article.
1. HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH, LAW AND REALITY: PROGRESS IN JUDICIAL REFORM
IN RWANDA 90 (2008), available at http://www.hrw.org/node/62098.
2. Rwanda's population of approximately seven million is composed of three
ethnic groups: Hutu (85 percent), Tutsi (14 percent), and Twa (1 percent). Lessons
from Rwanda: The United Nations and the Prevention of Genocide, THE UNITED
NATIONS, http://www.un.org/preventgenocide/rwanda/infokit.shtml (last visited Nov.
13,2010).
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The Impunity Gap of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda: Causes and Consequences
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