About | HeinOnline Law Journal Library | HeinOnline Law Journal Library | HeinOnline
LOG IN
LOG IN

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

What Is HeinOnline?

HeinOnline is a subscription-based resource containing thousands of academic and legal journals from inception; complete coverage of government documents such as U.S. Statutes at Large, U.S. Code, Federal Register, Code of Federal Regulations, U.S. Reports, and much more. Documents are image-based, fully searchable PDFs with the authority of print combined with the accessibility of a user-friendly and powerful database. For more information, request a quote or trial for your organization below.



Short-term subscription options include 24 hours, 48 hours, or 1 week to HeinOnline.

Purchase Access

Contact us for annual subscription options:

Contact Us

Already a HeinOnline Subscriber?

Log In

profiles profiles most