After the Genocide

Ordinary Rwandan courts acquired jurisdiction for genocide and crimes against humanity thanks to organic law 8/1996 because, despite Rwanda having ratified the 1948 Convention against Genocide, no internal legislation had been adopted to make punishment possible. The 1996 organic law punishes crimes from 1 October 1990 to 31 December 1994, suggesting a much broader interpretation of the Rwandan genocide over time than that proposed by the International Tribunal for Rwanda.

The case of Rwanda has aroused considerable interest regarding the potential use of the Inkiko as transitional justice tools, especially in those places where justice is perceived as a projection of western law and therefore culturally foreign.

The genocide was the culmination of cyclical violence that stems from the colonial past of this small African state. The Hutu-Tutsi dichotomy has undergone a process of progressive "ethnicization" to which, originally, it was completely foreign. The threshold of belonging to the two groups has always been permeable, until the Belgians crystallized the differences between Hutu and Tutsi through the imposition of ethnic identity cards in the 1920s. The regime that took office in Rwanda in the aftermath of the genocide immediately created a government of national unity with an emphasis on the need to eradicate the Hutu-Tutsi polarization as a prerequisite for peace building, as well as the need to rehabilitate the victims. of the genocide.

The Constitution written after July 1994 is greatly affected by the will to deal with the legacy of the genocide and for this very reason condemns all ethnic discrimination, as also article 11 states, which consecrates the principle of equality and the prohibition of discrimination. Article 13 prohibits revisionism, while Article 33 guarantees freedom of opinion.