Chapter 4 reconstructs the rise and fall of chambres spécialisées, specialized chambers lodged inside Rwanda’s professional courts of first instance. These newly created tribunals began their work in late 1996 and drew the ire of many international human rights organizations due to the RPF-led government’s disregard for international civil and political rights. Five years later, the chambres spécialisées had tried less than 6 percent of the more than 100,000 detainees who by then were languishing in the country’s overcrowded prisons and cachots (jails). By assessing, for the first time in any depth, the legal performance (in all senses of the word) of the country’s national genocide courts, the chapter sheds light on the dynamics of contention – and material exigencies – against the background of which a blueprint for the gacaca system was drawn up.