Belgian trial “major development”, rights group says

The New York based organisation, Human Rights Watch (HRW), has described the trial next week of four Rwandan genocide suspects in Belgium as a “major development in international justice”. “This is the first time a jury of ordinary people will judge ordinary people of another country who have been accused of such terrible crimes,” said Alison des Forges, a senior adviser to HRW’s Africa division who will be an expert witness at the trial. “The jurors will have to surmount the barrier of cultural differences to understand a context unlike any they have ever known,” she said in a statement released on Thursday. The four accused are two nuns, Consolata Mukangango and Julienne Mukabutera, the former head of a match factory Alphonse Higaniro and a former university professor Vincent Ntezimana. Although the charges arise from a genocide, the accused will be tried in Brussels for violations of the Geneva conventions and of the Belgian penal code because genocide was not a crime under Belgian law in 1994. The trial, which begins on Tuesday, is expected to last six weeks. “For decades we all have decried crimes against humanity,” Des Forges said. “This trial in Belgium offers the hope of transforming our anguish into something more effective, a way to punish and perhaps even prevent such horrors.”