Video link used in witness testimony

For the first time since its creation, the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) on Monday used video conferencing facilities to hear the testimony of a protected witness called by the prosecutor, ICTR announced.

The video link facility enabled the witness to testify directly from the premises of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague, The Netherlands, in the "media trial" involving Hassan Ngeze, Ferdinand Nahimana and Jean-Bosco Barayagwiza.

The video link has been made possible using satellite facilities provided by UN headquarters in New York. Plans are under way to install a digital broadcast conference platform at ICTR headquarters in Arusha, Tanzania, before the end of this year.

The system will enable teleconferencing and direct broadcast of court proceedings from the ICTR to recipients in Kigali, Rwanda, The Hague and New York. It will also help support the ICTR's outreach programme in Rwanda by making it possible to relay important trials directly to the Rwandan people through their local television and radio stations.

The ICTR, established in November 1994 to investigate and try suspected ringleaders of the 1994 genocide, currently spends some US $90 million annually, half of it to pay for staff, defence lawyers, and transportation of witnesses, according to The EastAfrican Kenya-based newspaper. Since it began its work in 1996, the court has tried nine of some 50 suspects held in custody in Arusha. Of these, eight have been convicted and one acquitted. Of the 120,000 people arrested and detained in Rwanda, 6,000 have been tried.

Meanwhile, on Tuesday, Bocar Sy of the ICTR press office confirmed to IRIN that the court planned to transfer some genocide cases to be heard in Rwanda to reduce the workload and expense of the court in Arusha. Rwanda's Justice Minister, Jean de Dieu Mucyo, was quoted by The EastAfrican on Monday as saying that the move would not only reduce budget constraints of the ICTR but "also make Rwandans feel part and parcel of the process".

The workload of the Tribunal is expected to be further reduced when a traditional court system known as "gacaca" begins operating in Rwanda in May. Some 260,000 gacaca judges were elected in October last year to preside over the community courts. However, the trials would only begin once the training of the judges had been completed, The EastAfrican reported. It cited the Rwandan ministry of justice as saying that the first gacaca trials would concentrate on the 20,000 suspects who had so far confessed to genocide and crimes against humanity.

A Rwandan government report, yet to be formally adopted, says 1,074,017 people, or one-seventh of the population of Rwanda, were killed in the genocide, more than 90 percent of them minority Tutsis. Compiled over a period of two years by the local government and social affairs ministry, the report uses 1990 as the baseline for counting deaths, rather than the three-month period in 1994 when most of the victims were killed, according to The EastAfrican.

After the 100 days of killing between April and July 1994, the number of victims was estimated by human rights organisations to be between 500,000 and 800,000. According to The EastAfrican, the Rwandan government report says 93.7 percent of the victims were Tutsis, who are generally believed to make up around 14 percent of the population; the remainder were Hutus married or related to Tutsis, and Hutus who did not support the government's extremist views.