Registrar asks for more judges

The registrar for the International Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), Adama Dieng, has asked the UN to approve a pool of 18 “standby” judges for the court to help it discharge its heavy caseload, the independent Hirondelle news agency reported. The agency quoted Dieng as telling a conference in England on ‘Justice in Africa’, that ICTR judges recognised that “the pace of justice needs to be expedited without compromising the integrity of the process” and had over the past two years introduced a number of changes to the ICTR’s rules to remove “delays and bottlenecks in the judicial process”. But he admitted that further measures were needed. “The judges are now approaching the outer limit to the possibilities for amending the rules and it has become clear that, in order to discharge the Tribunal’s heavy caseload by the end of the decade, given the current and future caseload generated by the indictments of the prosecutor, additional judicial manpower is necessary,” he said. He said that ICTR’s mandate was to try only the ringleaders of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda and that it was doing this job, and would try at most “100 - 150” persons during its lifespan.