Training begins for recently appointed judges

Training has started for hundreds of judges, appointed in July, on Rwanda's new laws, procedures and code of ethnics, Supreme Court President Tharcise Karugarama told IRIN on Wednesday.

"These judges are going to be facing many new and amended laws," Judge Karugarama said in Kigali. "The training will give them the necessary foundation and take over their responsibilities."

Rwandan judges the government considers to have the necessary knowledge and experience are conducting the training, which started on Monday.

The government had sacked some 500 judges in July as part of its sweeping judicial reforms. The move is supposed to improve judicial performance and weed out corruption and inefficiency. The reforms are the first since 1962, when the country attained independence.

Karugarama said the sacked judges lacked the qualifications and experience required under the new reforms. "There have been so many changes that must be instilled in the judges' minds," he said.

Rwanda's judicial system has been criticised, especially by survivors of the 1994 genocide, for being too slow to bring to justice the tens of thousands of people accused of taking part.

The current training is for new judges and prosecutors in military and civilian courts. The new civilian judges were appointed to district and provincial courts, as well as the newly created High Court and newly restructured Supreme Court.

The government scrapped six chambers of the Supreme Court, leaving one. The government also appointed a new chief justice to head the 14 judges of the Supreme Court.

Rwanda introduced a new High Court with four administrative centres in different parts of the country and appointed many court clerks.

The reforms included harmonising the civil and common law systems, and adapting the judicial system to lessen the huge backlog of cases. The government has also turned to traditional community courts, known in Kinyarwanda as 'gacaca', in a bid to speed up trials.

The gacaca courts are trying low-level suspects in the genocide while the conventional judicial system is trying higher-profile cases. The UN International Criminal Court for Rwanda, in the northern Tanzanian town of Arusha, is only trying those people suspected of bearing the greatest responsibility for the genocide.