An international tribunal based in The Hague ruled on Wednesday that octogenarian Felicien Kabuga, accused of the 1994 Rwandan genocide, cannot stand trial because of his advanced age. The former businessman was arrested in Paris in 2020 after more than two decades on the run. The Tribunal accused him of providing financial support to the Hutu militias, who at that time killed about 800,000 people in Rwanda.
Kabuga is well into his eighties, although his exact date of birth is disputed, and he also suffers from senile dementia. According to the decision of the trial court, he can no longer attend the hearing on the merits. The judges decided to give him an alternative procedure that would be “as close as possible to a formal trial, but without the possibility of sentencing.”
During the 1994 Rwandan genocide, about 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutu were killed within a hundred days. In November 1994, the United Nations Security Council established the International Criminal Tribunal (ICTR) to find and prosecute those responsible for the Rwandan genocide. The mandate of the court expired in 2015 and the outstanding cases were transferred to the United Nations International Forensic Mechanism (MICT).
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