Gacaca's end and its legacy
Aug 05, 2009
from Gregory Gordon's post on Opinio Juris:
The Rwandan government announced today that it will stop taking new gacaca cases as of July 31st and that it intends to wind down gacaca operations within five months. Gacaca is a traditional local justice procedure (gacaca roughly means “justice on the grass” in Kinyarwanda) that the government modified to process the staggering number of low-level genocide cases and help reconcile perpetrators with their communities. Starting in 2002, the Rwandans began operating a system of more than 10,000 gacaca courts. Regardless of what one may think about its merits, the gacaca experience has represented a Herculean task with hundreds of thousands of cases processed in the past few years. In the words of Lars Waldorf, it was mass justice for mass atrocity. But was it successful? I was asked today on the BBC World Service (interview starts at the 18:53 mark) about gacaca’s legacy and I noted that it was mixed.
....But somewhere in the process of retrofitting it for mass atrocity, gacaca appears to have lost its core restorative justice defining qualities. In my upcoming article “Complementarity and Alternative Justice” (to be published in the Oregon Law Review), I explore this dilemma in greater depth. I still believe that there is hope for successfully using traditional alternative justice mechanisms to deal with gross human rights violations. For that, a better calibrated hybridization will be necessary. Posterity may not ultimately view gacaca as the ideal blueprint; but it will likely appreciate it as an invaluable testing ground.
