Tribunal in The Hague: the suspect in the financing of the genocide in Rwanda cannot stand trial — because of insanity

The UNʼs International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals has ruled that 88-year-old Rwandan businessman Felicien Kabuga, who is said to be a major financier of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, cannot stand trial.

The court made the decision on June 6, Reuters cites.

Kabugaʼs lawyers argued that he suffered from dementia. In their ruling, the judges said that Kabuga "is unable to fully participate in the trial and is unlikely to regain his fitness in the future." It is the first time in a years-long campaign to prosecute Rwandan genocide suspects that a court has issued such a ruling.

The judges proposed an alternative judicial procedure that is as similar as possible to a trial, but without the possibility of a guilty verdict.

The court suspended the trial in March to allow Felicien Kabugaʼs health to be assessed. According to court documents, he is 88 years old, although there is some disagreement as to his exact age.

According to the investigation, Kabuga used his fortune, which he made in the tea trade in the 1970s, to buy machetes, which were used to arm the Hutus. The businessman is also accused of using his radio station to call on Hutus to kill Tutsis, inciting genocide and broadcasting inflammatory hate speech.

Felicien Kabuga was arrested in Paris in 2020 after evading arrest and moving around East Africa for 26 years. French investigators traced him to an apartment in Paris, where he lived under an assumed name.

• On April 6, 1994, in Rwanda, representatives of the Hutu people began to destroy the related Tutsi people. In three months, Hutu radicals killed from 500 thousand to a million people, including those Hutus who did not support the violence.