RWANDA TRIBUNAL REGISTRAR SAYS DETAINEES HUNGER STRIKE UNWARRANTED

Press Release
AFR/111
L/2901

RWANDA TRIBUNAL REGISTRAR SAYS DETAINEES HUNGER STRIKE UNWARRANTED

ARUSHA, 26 October (International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda) -- Following is a statement by the Registrar of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) on the assignment of defence counsel to detainees at the United Nations detention facilities in Arusha.

The Registrar has today received a letter signed by 25 out of the 32 detainees in the Tribunal's detention facilities indicating that they have embarked on a hunger strike. The detainees claim to have adopted this course of action because of an alleged denial of their human rights in the assignment of defence counsel to them by the Registrar.

This development is not, and should not be, surprising. The full gravity of their situation is dawning on these detainees. They are on trial or awaiting trial for genocide and other serious violations of international law committed in Rwanda in 1994. The Judges of the Tribunal have already imposed the maximum penalty of life imprisonment on two individuals that have been found guilty -- one pleaded guilty and the other sentenced was imposed after a full trial. The reality of the Tribunal's work of calling to account persons accused of genocide in Rwanda is beginning to establish itself. In these circumstances, these detainees may feel that they have nothing to lose by engaging in these agitations.

In the early days of the Tribunal's work, an attempt was made by a small group of lawyers, mainly from Canada and Belgium, to monopolize the defence of persons accused by the Tribunal so that they could determine the course of events, including blocking the Tribunal's judicial proceedings as they saw fit. This was a major factor in the Tribunal's decision to streamline the assignment of defence counsel through the adoption, in January 1996, of the Directive on the Assignment of Defence Counsel, approved by the Judges in Plenary Session.

At present, 41 lawyers from all over the world are assigned as defence counsel and co-counsel to the detainees in the Tribunal's custody in Arusha.

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Of these, seven are Canadian, seven are French, four are Cameroonian, three are from Belgium, two are from Kenya, five (mostly temporary duty-counsel) are from the United Republic of Tanzania, and one each from the United Kingdom, United States, Netherlands, Central African Republic, Burkina Faso, Madagascar, Côte d'Ivoire and Tunisia.

Nearly all of these lawyers have been chosen by the detainees themselves out of a list of lawyers from all over the world maintained by the Registry. However, under the Tribunal's Rules, assignment of counsel is the responsibility of the Registrar, who has the duty as manager of public funds allocated to the Tribunal, to manage these prudently. This responsibility is acknowledged by the detainees in their letter. Defence lawyers are assigned to detainees who cannot afford the costs of hiring their own lawyer, in order to ensure respect for the right of the accused to a fair trial. In making the decision on lawyers to assign, the Registrar takes into consideration several factors and requirements, including chiefly, the choice of the accused, as well as the need to ensure that defence counsel at the Tribunal are drawn, as stipulated by the Judges, from a wide geographical representation.

The ICTR's programme for ensuring legal representation for accused who cannot afford to pay for such representation has been commended. Even the most generous legal aid programmes in any national jurisdiction do not match it. In legal aid in national jurisdictions, an accused person generally has no choice in the counsel assigned to him or her, who typically is employed by the State. In the ICTR, the Registry presents the accused with a short list of six lawyers with a wide spectrum of backgrounds and attributes. Indeed, in many cases the accused have chosen lawyers from outside the list, who, if they otherwise meet the criteria, have been assigned.

As an illustration, the ICTR has spent $575,600 to meet the cost and remuneration of defence counsel for Jean-Paul Akayesu, who has twice changed his lawyers and again requested changes on two other occasions. The cost to the Tribunal in financial terms and in terms of delays upon a change of counsel is substantial, given that the new counsel has to be given time to become familiar with the case. There is no better proof of the Tribunal's efforts to ensure that Mr. Akayesu receives adequate legal representation. A similar situation applies to all the other detainees in the custody of the ICTR. The Tribunal's projected expenditure for the payment of defence lawyers in fiscal year 1999 is over $5 million.

Against this background, the Registry believes that hunger strikes by detainees to pressure the Tribunal are unwarranted in the face of the very liberal programme described above -- and may indeed be unrelated to the issue of assignment of defence counsel.

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