Abstract

Having been created on November 08, 1994, the ICTR closed its doors on December 31, 2015. The President of the Security Council, while praising the merits of this international criminal court, international organizations and scientific leaders deplore the “failure” of the Tribunal to judge the crimes committed by all parties to the conflict in Rwanda in 1994, its inability to organize fair and equitable trials and its inability to prevent the justice of the ICTR from being phagocytosed by the victors and the major powers members of the Security Council. In terms of the organization of trials, the ICTR has prosecuted only one party to the conflict, has enshrined the impunity of one party to the conflict, has excelled in trampling unreservedly on the principle of the presumption of innocence, and has placed exclusive control of the evidence in the hands of the Government of Kigali and the Prosecutor. In view of the performance of this Tribunal, justice is trampled on, crushed, and rather put at the service of the Winner in the Rwandan conflict that opposes the Tutsis to the Hutus. The Jean Kambanda and Jean-Bosco Barayagwiza cases illustrate this dangerous drift.

Keywords: Security Council resolution, Tutsi genocide, Rwandan genocide, International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, phagocytic justice, failure of international criminal justice, international crimes, international trials, presumption of innocence, habeas corpus.