Chris Muhizi for MCN Wednesday June 7/2023.
Felicien Kabuga, a former businessman and radio station owner, was one of the final defendants pursued by the tribunal investigating the 1994 genocide, in which Hutu extremists in control of the majority slaughtered more than 800,000 minority Tutsis and Hutu moderates in within 100 days.
In a ruling issued on Wednesday, judges at a UN war crimes court determined that elderly Rwandan genocide suspect Felicien Kabuga is unfit to face trial but that scaled-down legal proceedings in his case can proceed.
According to a ruling posted on the website of The Hague court, “the trial chamber finds Mr. Kabuga is no longer capable of meaningful participation in his trial.”
The judges announced that they would establish a “alternative finding procedure that resembles a trial as closely as possible, but without the possibility of a conviction,” rather than suspending the trial.
It was unclear right away how such proceedings would go or what would happen to Kabuga, who is being held in the court’s custody facility in The Hague.
Kabuga is in his late 80s, after more than 20 years on the run, he was captured in France in 2020.
Doctors’ findings that Kabuga had dementia led to the decision.
Since September of last year, Kabuga has been on trial at the United Nations facility in The Hague that took over the ICT for Rwanda’s functions.
Since his arrest, his attorneys have attempted to get the case dismissed owing to health issues stemming from his senior age.
When Kabuga was captured and brought to the Mechanism for International Criminal Tribunals (MICT) at The Hague in 2020, he was living under a false identity outside of Paris and was accused with genocide and crimes against humanity, including persecution, annihilation, and murder.
The 87-year-old, one of the most sought men in the world, is frequently referred to as the financier of the killing of over one million people in Rwanda between April and June 1994.
