On November 8, Ambassador Joseph Mutaboba, speaking...

On November 8, Ambassador Joseph Mutaboba, speaking at the Third Committee of the General Assembly, said that the International Criminal Tribunals were a less-than-perfect response to mass atrocities. Among the primary reasons for Rwanda's opposition to the UN Tribunal was the fact that the strongest punishment available to the Tribunal was life imprisonment, whereas the Rwandan legal system permitted capital punishment. Since its inception, the Tribunal had indicted 48 individuals, 36 of whom were detained in Arusha. Five had been tried and sentenced. The Rwandan national judiciary, with its highly limited resources, had brought more than 20,000 genocide-related indictments; 17,847 of the defendants had pleaded guilty; 1,989 had been tried and 5,760 released; only 294 had been sentenced to capital punishment. Those trials had been closely monitored by the international community and had been found to conform to the highest international standards. Prisoners are tried in public before the entire community. Drawing on recollections of the accused and the villagers, the judges compile a list of those who died in the genocide, and those responsible. The accused are then judged and sentenced. The innocent are released and the guilty punished in accordance with the severity of their crimes.