Judge Carmel Agius – President of the International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals (UNIRMCT) on Monday laid a wreath on the mass graves that serves as the final resting place for more than 250,000 victims of the Genocide at Gisozi, a hill overlooking Kigali city.
Judge Agius arrived in Kigali for a set of consultations with Rwandan judicial officials, an official source disclosed to APA in Kigali.
“Never again, Genocide is more than bad,” Judge Carmel Agius wrote in the guestbook at the memorial.
UNIRMCT is a replacement system for the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) which was closed down in December 2015 so that Genocide cases are transferred to Rwanda.
During its two decades of work in Arusha, in Northern Tanzania, the ICTR sentenced 61 people to terms of up to life imprisonment for their roles in the massacres which took place over the course of three months of bloodletting by Hutu extremists in Rwanda.
Fourteen accused were acquitted and 10 others referred to national courts.
Judge Agius replaced controversial American Judge Theodor Meron who had in many occasions become a thorn in the survivors’ feet, especially when he released several genocide fugitives.
CU/abj/APA