Fourth courtroom opens at UN tribunal

A fourth courtroom opened on Tuesday at the UN International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) as part of its efforts to expedite the genocide trials and to meet the UN's closure deadline of 2008.

The new courtroom "will facilitate steady progress [of the trials] and increase judicial output", Judge Erik Mose, the president of the tribunal, said during the opening ceremony at the tribunal's headquarters in Arusha, Tanzania.

Built with money from Britain and Norway, the new courtroom is located in the Arusha International Conference Centre. The tribunal's first three courtrooms were built between 1995 and 1999.

Norway contributed US $300,000 and Britain $120,000 for the construction and running costs of the new courtroom until the end of 2008, Mose said.

"When the first three courtrooms were constructed during the first mandate, the tribunal had usually about three trials going on over the same period," Mose said. "Now the situation is quite different. The number of trials to be heard in the months ahead of us is nine."

He said lack of courtroom space had previously complicated the scheduling of trials and slowed down cases.

"For sometime, we have been sitting in morning and afternoon shifts," he added. "Each shift allows for about four hours efficient time in the courtroom, whereas a full day enables a Chamber to sit for six hours."

Under the shift system, he said, each Chamber ended up losing about two hours a day, or at least eight hours a week, compared to a full-day session.

The British High Commissioner to Tanzania, Andrew Pocock, and the Norwegian ambassador, Jorunn Maehlem, reassured the tribunal of their government's commitment to ensure that the court dispensed justice according to its mandate.

"All states must demonstrate their full support to the tribunal to ensure justice is done over the Rwandan genocide," Maehlem said.

"The work of the tribunal has been groundbreaking as far [an] international justice system is concerned," Pocock added.

Some of the decisions rendered at the tribunal are now referred to in other international cases and jurisdictions.

The UN Security Council established the tribunal to bring to trial the key perpetrators of the 1994 Rwandan genocide, in which 937,000 Tutsis and politically moderate Hutus were killed.