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afrol.com, 20 October - The Appeals Chamber of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) today unanimously upheld the genocide conviction of Jean Kambanda, former Prime Minister of Rwanda, making him the first head of government to be convicted and punished for genocide. Mr. Kambanda had been convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment by the ICTR's Trial Chamber in 1998 after pleading guilty to genocide and crimes against humanity. He first appealed that sentence, arguing that it was excessive. Later, having changed his lawyer, Mr. Kambanda sought to have his conviction quashed and a retrial ordered on the grounds that he had not been represented by a lawyer of his own choosing, that he had been detained in oppressive conditions and that the Trial Chamber had failed to satisfy itself that the guilty plea was voluntary, informed and unequivocal. The Appeals Chamber rejected each of those arguments. In its judgment, the Appeals Chamber said that "Jean Kambanda, a former Prime Minister of the Government of Rwanda, given his intellectual and professional abilities, was capable of understanding the consequences of the crimes he had committed." In accordance with the ICTR Statute, Mr. Kambanda will serve his sentence in either Mali, Benin or Swaziland, the three countries with which the Tribunal has concluded agreements for the imprisonment of persons whose convictions have become definitive. Jean Kambanda became prime minister of Rwanda at the start of the 1994 genocide in which at least half a million Tutsis and Hutu moderates were killed. He had been arrested in Nairobi by the Kenyan authorities on July 18, 1997 and was transferred to Arusha the same day. He pleaded guilty to genocide and crimes against humanity and was sentenced to life imprisonment on 4 September 1998. Jean Kambanda's conviction was one of the few major achievements of the UN tribunal. The tribunal's work has been slowed, not only by its own ineptitude but also by protracted legal arguments from most of the suspects it has in custody, who regularly change their defence lawyers. Source:
Based on ICTR
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