INTRODUCTION

To address the legacy of the International Criminal Tribune for Rwanda (ICTR) at this time seems to be a rather strange exercise as the ICTR is still working, albeit in the context of the Residual Mechanism. It is like writing an obituary for a person who is still alive. The approach I have therefore partly chosen is to deal with the ICTR and its legacy from the perspective of how one would look back at the ICTR in some 25 years from now. How will the ICTR be assessed in 2040? This is a perspective that might enable us to look at the headlines and highlight what really had an impact on the development of international criminal law or the practice of international criminal tribunals and states. It is also an approach that focuses less on the technical legal details and may be more policy oriented. On the other hand, it will be inevitable to deal with some current issues as well.

THE FIRST AFRICAN INTERNATIONAL CRIMINAL TRIBUNAL

To a certain extent the ICTR was the logical consequence of the establishment of the ICTY. Once the United Nations Security Council was willing to set up an international criminal tribunal for atrocities committed in Europe, it was more than logical to create a similar tribunal for a conflict in Africa pending at the same time. Together with its twin sister the ICTY, the ICTR also contributed strongly to the establishment of the ICC, as the existence of the two ad hoc tribunals made clear that it would be impossible for the future to create a separate tribunal for each conflict yet to come. Both the ICTY and the ICTR thus influenced the way other initiatives were shaped, some of which got a hybrid nature (Special Panels for East Timor, the Special Court for Sierra Leone, the Extraordinary Criminal Chambers in Cambodia, as well as the Lebanon Tribunal). The hybrid courts were able to meet the criticism that the relevant national legislation played hardly any role and that the proceedings took place far away from the country involved.