ICTR welcomes report on fee-splitting

The Arusha-based International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) has welcomed a recent UN report into allegations of fee-splitting between genocide suspects and their defence lawyers. ICTR spokesman Kingsley Moghalu told the Hirondelle news agency on Tuesday the report underlined issues which the ICTR was already trying to tackle and it could help bring about reforms. “Our problem mainly here, I would think, is this whole question of gifts [from defence counsel to detainees] and the whole question of who are the defence investigators, and just the possibility that the defence teams are being used to breach regulations in the UNDF [United Nations Detention Facility],” Moghalu said. “That’s a big problem for us, I will admit.” Moghalu earlier told journalists, in response to the report, that the ICTR had fired 21 members of defence teams between July 1997 and March this year for breach of UN rules. “Obviously a lot of that predates the OIOS [UN Office of Internal Oversight Services] report on alleged fee-splitting,” he told Hirondelle. “But I think what the actions we have taken show is that we were concerned about some of these possibilities.” Hirondelle recalled that the UN report found indications of fee-splitting at both the ICTR and the International Criminal Tribunal for former Yugoslavia and concluded that further investigations were needed at both tribunals.