Amoury Combs, Nancy --- "The evidentiary system" [2016] ELECD 1521; in de Brouwer, Anne-Marie; Smeulers, Alette (eds), "The Elgar Companion to the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2016) 328

Book Title: The Elgar Companion to the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda

Editor(s): de Brouwer, Anne-Marie; Smeulers, Alette

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

ISBN (hard cover): 9781784711696

Section: Chapter 11

Section Title: The evidentiary system

Author(s): Amoury Combs, Nancy

Number of pages: 23

Abstract/Description:

As one of the first two ‘modern’ international criminal tribunals, the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) has broken new ground in a variety of substantive fields. As the first international court to prosecute genocide, the ICTR has had a profound impact on various issues surrounding that crime. The ICTR’s determinations of the acts that constitute genocide and the groups protected under the prohibition against genocide have been highly influential, as have its pronouncements on incitement to genocide and sexual violence in international criminal law. This chapter centres on the ICTR’s evidence rules, and in that realm, the tribunal has had a somewhat lesser impact. As described in Chapter 1, the United Nations Security Council created the ICTR less than a year after it created the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), and it directed the ICTR judges to adopt the same rules of procedure and evidence already in place at the ICTY. Although the Security Council authorized ICTR judges to make any changes to the ICTY’s procedural rules that ‘they deem[ed] necessary’, ICTR judges made very few changes. Thus, the ICTR’s evidentiary rules track closely to the ICTY’s evidentiary rules. Just because the evidentiary rules on the books at the ICTY and ICTR are virtually the same, however, does not mean that the rules gave rise to similar evidentiary issues and difficulties. Quite the contrary.