UN tribunal to transfer cases to Kigali

The UN International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) has identified at least 40 cases it intends to transfer to national courts in Rwanda in early 2005, the prosecutor for the tribunal, Hassan Jallow, said on Friday in the Rwandan capital, Kigali. "We will take the necessary steps to get some of the cases to [Kigali]," Jallow said after a meeting with Rwandan President Paul Kagame. The cases due to be transferred include some for genocide suspects currently held in a detention facility at the tribunal's headquarters in Arusha, Tanzania, he said, as well others who are still at large. When they are apprehended, Jallow said they would be sent to Rwanda by the apprehending country. Jallow added that some individuals convicted by the tribunal would begin serving their sentences in Rwandan prisons next year. "The expectation is that by the end of the year [2004] we should have in place two agreements in force - one regarding the transfer of cases to Rwanda and the other regarding the transfer of prisoners to Rwanda," he said. Jallow was vague, however, regarding the thorny issue of indicting suspects currently in the Rwandan national army. "We are at a stage where we are evaluating the evidence that we have accumulated over the years in order to determine what cases, if any, that we have under that particular area," he said. Military officers in the former Tutsi-led rebel group, the Rwandan Patriotic Army (RPA) allegedly committed war crimes prior to and during the 1994 genocide, which claims the lives of at least 930,000 people, according to the Rwandan government. Relations between Kigali and the ICTR had been strained partly because the former prosecutor, Carla del Ponte, had sought to arrest some members of the current Rwanda army. None have so far been brought to justice by the ICTR. It has only indicted members of the mainly Hutu former Rwandan armed forces or ex-FAR, who formed the national army during the genocide. Since the tribunal's inception in 1994, it has indicted 81 suspects, convicting 20 and acquitted three. Jallow has made several visits to Rwanda since becoming the ICTR prosecutor in September 2003.