BY GODWIN AGABA
The New Times

The Gacaca structure will change soon, the Executive Secretary of National Service of Gacaca (NSGC) jurisdictions, Domitilla Mukantanganzwa, has said.

Mukantanganzwa told The Sunday Times on January 4 that where there were fourteen judges they have to be reduced to nine, and where they were nine they will have to be five. All court councils are going to change at each level. But the organic law is in parliament for endorsement.

“In spite of many challenges, notably in terms of insuring the security of both defendants and survivors, the year 2006 has marked a decisive step for the semi-traditional Rwandan Gacaca courts in charge of judging the majority of the suspects of the 1994 Genocide,” Mukatanganzwa noted.

Approximately 40,000 accused have been tried since Gacaca courts, initially limited to 106 tribunals, were extended to the whole country in mid-July last year. In parallel to these judgments, the gathering of information pertaining to the perpetration of the Genocide has been almost entirely completed in every village in Rwanda, NSGC has reported.

This fundamental step, on which all the process depends, consists in establishing a list of victims and a list of genocide suspects and to sort the latter into categories depending on the seriousness of the crimes. Thereby, according to the NSGC, there were 766,489 suspects persons at the end of October, 72,539 of them within the first category, 397,103 in the second and 296,847 in the third one.

The first category comprises those suspected of the most serious crimes: genocide planners, reputed killers and rapists.

Gacaca tribunals, which can issue a maximum sentence of 30 years in prison, are not competent to judge the accused listed in this category. They will continue being prosecuted before conventional tribunals.

Encouraged by its five-month experience, the Rwandan government wishes that, by providing all the necessary resources, all trials taking place before Gacaca courts can be over by the end of 2007.

Cell jurisdictions are in charge of collecting information and trying the authors of offences against properties. They do not pronounce prison sentences. There are currently 9,013 Gacaca courts of the cell, 1,545 Gacaca courts of the sector and as many appeal courts at the sector level.

But difficulties remain, the most worrying being the lack of protection that genocide survivors, witnesses and judges (inyangamugayo) serving in the Gacaca courts sometimes suffer from, according to NSGC.