Final case at UN tribunals for Yugoslavia and Rwanda atrocities comes to an end

THE HAGUE, Netherlands (AP) — The U.N. courts set up to prosecute the atrocities committed during the violent disintegration of Yugoslavia in the early 1990s and the 1994 Rwandan genocide held their final session on Wednesday, bringing to an end a decades-long process for international justice.

The hearing marked “a truly historic milestone,” presiding Judge Iain Bonomy said, formally ending the proceedings involving the alleged financier of the genocide, Félicien Kabuga, who died on Saturday.

Kabuga, somewhere in his 90s — his age is disputed — and suffering from severe dementia, had been forced to remain in the United Nations detention facility in The Hague after he was found unfit to stand trial in 2023 as no country was willing to take him in, prolonging the case against him.

That the Kabuga case was the final proceedings is “symbolic of the state of international justice,” which faces a time of crisis, said Lucy Gaynor, a historian at the University of Amsterdam.

“Countries put limits on what they are willing to do,” she said.

Kabuga had remained in legal limbo after doctors determined it was too dangerous for him to make a significant journey and, despite the ongoing efforts of the tribunal, no nearby countries would offer him asylum.

He died six years to the day that he was arrested outside of Paris in 2020 after evading capture for nearly two decades.

Kabuga's case was the last ongoing proceeding at the International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals, the U.N. run body that took over the remaining cases from the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda when it closed its doors in 2015 and the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia when it shut in 2017.

The pair of tribunals, each established on the order of the U.N. Security Council in the early 1990s, convicted 155 people for atrocity crimes and paved the way for the creation of the International Criminal Court in 2002.

Located just 2 miles away from the former insurance building that housed the residual mechanism, the ICC was set up as a permanent, global court to prosecute humanity’s worst crimes and forestall the need to create ad hoc tribunals for every conflict.

The ICC has been targeted with sanctions by U.S. President Donald Trump for pursuing investigations into officials from the U.S. and Israel, which aren’t among the court’s 125 member states.

Several countries have refused to arrest Russian President Vladimir Putin and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who are both wanted on ICC warrants, and Italy declined to hand over a Libyan warlord last year, returning him on a state plane to Tripoli instead.

For Rwandans, Kabuga’s death highlights the shortcomings of the accountability process. Genocide survivor Agnes Mukamurenzi, who knew Kabuga, said he deserved a long painful life in detention. “I wish he lived longer in prison to feel the pain. During the genocide, he played a key role that saw many innocent lives taken,” she told AP.

The 12-minute sitting on Wednesday took place in a modified conference room one floor above the building’s primary courtroom, where Ratko Mladic, the military chief known as the “Butcher of Bosnia,” was convicted of genocide and the Croat commander Slobodan Praljak drank lethal poison during an appeals hearing.

The residual mechanism vacated the courtroom last year, pairing down to a skeleton staff, and now faces an uncertain future. Its mandate runs out in June and there is no transition plan for its remaining functions, including overseeing the detention conditions of the 41 people still serving their sentences.

It is also unclear what will happen to the millions of pages of documents and thousands of items of evidence in the mechanism’s archives, including Mladic’s handwritten diaries and copies of the inflammatory newspaper Kangura which Kabuga was accused of bankrolling.

In January, Trump pulled the U.S. out of the organization, taking away millions in financial support.

On hearing news about Kabuga’s death, Dr. Philibert Gakwenzire the head of IBUKA, the umbrella representing survivors of the 1994 Rwanda Genocide said that while Kabuga died without being tried, “history is the true judge.”

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Ignatius Ssuuna contributed from Kigali, Rwanda.