Global Courant
The UN war crimes court deemed the 90-year-old genocide suspect “no longer capable of meaningful participation.”
Felicien Kabuga, the 90-year-old Rwandan genocide suspect, is unfit to stand trial, judges of a UN war crimes tribunal in The Hague have ruled.
Kabuga, who had been living under a false identity for decades and evaded capture, was arrested at his home in Paris in May 2020. He was subsequently extradited to The Hague, where he pleaded not guilty.
He went on trial in September last year, but refused to appear in court or at a distance at the start of his trial. He followed the process via video link from a wheelchair in the detention center of the court.
The court suspended the trial in March this year due to health concerns.
“The trial chamber rules that Mr. Kabuga is no longer able to meaningfully participate in his trial,” the court said in a decision published on Wednesday.
Accused of financing genocide
The former businessman, who made his fortune in the tea trade, is one of the latest suspects wanted by the tribunal to prosecute crimes committed in the 1994 genocide, when ruling Hutu majority fighters killed more than 800,000 Tutsis and Hutu moderates killed.
He is accused of funding Hutu militias and encouraging hate speech on his radio station, Radio Television Libre des Milles Collines (RTLM).
In September 2022, UN prosecutor Rashid Rashid said in his opening statement that Kabuga did not have to pick up a microphone himself to call for the killing of Tutsis, but set up a radio station that “broadcast genocidal propaganda throughout Rwanda”.
Prosecutors said the genocide charges included rape and assault, as well as murders. Hutus were encouraged in RTLM broadcasts to “taste” Tutsi women, they said.
He was also accused of supplying Hutu death squads with machetes. Kabuga has denied these allegations.
A handout photo of Felicien Kabuga released May 16, 2020 by the International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals (Mecanisme pour les Tribunaux penaux internationaux/AFP)
Judges follow ‘alternative’ procedure
Instead of stopping the trial, the judges said on Wednesday they would set up an “alternative finding procedure as similar as possible to a trial, but without the possibility of a conviction.”
So far, sixty-two Rwandan genocide suspects have been convicted by the tribunal.
