International Criminal Law as a Spotlight and Black Holes as Constituents of Legacy

This contribution engages with Sara Kendall’s and Sarah Nouwen’s article on the legacy of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) and their call for an ethos of institutional modesty. I much support the nuanced approach that underlies their call and I see it as a prerequisite to properly and adequately appreciate the ICTR’s past existence and operation. I would even be open to moving one step further in the direction of an ethos of sobriety. Rather than seizing the momentum to celebrate accomplishments and highlight milestones, legacy-talk and legacy-construction of international criminal tribunals should entail a form of reckoning. Indeed, as suggested by Kendall and Nouwen, the “justices not done” and the “justices pending” must be part and parcel of the ICTR’s legacy-constructions so as to offer a fair balance and to capture the ICTR’s overall performance, explicitly accounting for results as well as omissions.

legacy, and particularly the ICTR's legacy, in a more balanced manner. Using the metaphor of ICL as a spotlight, it submits that black holes are also constituents of legacy and should be treated as such.

International Criminal Law as a Spotlight
International criminal law acts as a spotlight in several ways. It is at its core concerned with the application of norms that belong to the corpus of jus cogens. 5 The entire area of law thus attracts significant attention through the power of the concepts that it uses. This power determines the intensity of the spotlight. Given this intensity and power of attraction, framing a situation as an international crime or calling for an International Criminal Court-referral has become a mainstream response to any type of contemporary crisis. The language and lenses of ICL are nowadays also increasingly used by actors other than courts. Human rights rapporteurs, commissions of inquiry, and NGOs use ICL labels to alert the international community of wrongdoing and to shed light on situations of gross human rights violations. 6 By definition, ICL tells a compelling story. It exposes, and it does so in a dualistic manner that appeals to the human psyche which is equally conditioned to categorize in good versus evil. An act either constitutes an international crime, or it does not; and a person either carries criminal responsibility or not. More than any other type of legal process, ICL processes offer a very selective picture of what transpired, as several scholars have already observed on different occasions. 7 Indeed, ICL singles out concrete acts and attaches individual criminal responsibility thereby reducing broader situations to the criminal responsibility of specified individuals. It thus filters realities through the use of precise definitions and categories of responsibility including concomitant rules of interpretation guiding their application, as well as through the use of the highest evidentiary standards and other strict rules of procedure. Shaped by this register of ICL, the mandates of international criminal tribunals and the extent of their jurisdiction determine the scope of ICL's spotlight. Facts and entities that cannot find a place within this architecture of ICL remain outside the spotlight.
Already at the moment of the ICTR's establishment back in 1994, Security Council discussions demonstrated a recognition of ICL's spotlight-potential. Precisely for such "spotlight-reasons," the new Rwandan government at the time contested the ICTR's proposed jurisdiction as also set out by Matheson and Scheffer in their contribution to AJIL's Legacy-symposium. 8 Discontent with the inclusion of war crimes in the ICTR's substantive jurisdiction and the extension of the temporal jurisdiction beyond the end of the genocide to the entire year of 1994, Rwanda ultimately even voted against the establishment of the Tribunal. In a spirit similar to Rwanda's, i.e., with a view to escaping scrutiny, France opposed backdating the temporal jurisdiction to 1 October 1990, the date of the original Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) invasion. 9 Situated in the region, but not directly implicated, Kenya criticized the substantive jurisdiction as being incomplete. It argued in favor of more holistic investigations that would also examine the downing of the aircraft killing the Presidents of Rwanda and Burundi as well as the invasion of Rwanda prior to that. 10 These discussions that took place over twenty years ago reflect a political sense and keen awareness that setting the jurisdiction of an ad hoc tribunal is an exercise with great spotlight-ramifications.

The ICTR's Black Holes
Immediately after its establishment, the ICTR started to prosecute individuals for genocide as it was tasked to do. Over a lifespan of more than twenty years, this endeavor resulted in the key figures as meticulously detailed on the ICTR/Mechanism for International Criminal Tribunal's (MICT) legacy website. 11 Crucial acts and events that were ultimately not prosecuted at the ICTR include the following: the ICTR did not adjudicate the RPF's October 1990-invasion, it did not investigate and prosecute the downing of President Habyarimana's airplane, and it did not prosecute any RPF members for alleged crimes against humanity and war crimes. Those black holes have different origins. Pre-1994 events were kept out of the spotlight from the start by the drafters of the Statute, as set out above, and the ICTR Trial and Appeals Chambers confirmed this temporal boundary on several occasions, inter alia in the Media case. 12 This black hole was thus predetermined by the ICTR's mandate combined with judicial interpretive choices and confirmations. It was equally not envisioned by the drafters to bring the downing of the plane within the ICTR's substantive jurisdiction. It has been suggested that the Prosecutor could have investigated and prosecuted this nonetheless as a war crime, and while this would indeed have required some creative thinking, 13 it is well known that innovative constructions were not entirely absent in the early years of the ad hoc tribunals. Hence, the suggestion was not without any merit. Yet here again, ICTR actors-this time the Prosecutor-confirmed the drafters' focus. The statutory exclusions did not pre-empt the defense to litigate on these matters but to no avail. 14 As regards the allegation of crimes against humanity and war crimes committed by the RPF, those fell squarely within the jurisdiction but remained equally unaddressed for other reasons, as also explained by Kendall and Nouwen in their article. 15 Beyond black holes that result from architectural design and prosecutorial or judicial choice, the ICL paradigm as such also has the tendency to leave counterfactuals in the shadow. In the context of Rwanda, these counterfactuals regard questions such as: What if the RPF had pursued its political aspirations to return in a less violent manner back in 1990? What if the RPF had worked together with the MDR, the moderate party of Twagiramungu, to implement the 1993 Arusha Peace Agreements? Instead, the RPF's decision to attack in October 1990 and its decision to break the cease-fire in February 1993 definitely contributed to an escalating scene. 16 In his book From War to Genocide, former ICTR expert witness and Rwanda scholar, André Guichaoua describes the bipolarization strategies that extremist RPF-factions (as well as extremist Hutu-factions) engaged in to delay and obstruct the implementation of the Arusha Peace Agreements. 17 The RPF's actions in the period between 1990 and 1994 cannot all be easily captured in ICL terms and rubrics and there is no point in stretching international criminal responsibility to breaking point. But by offering such a dominant spotlight, ICL-institutions tend to steal the limelight of other types of responsibilities, including moral and political responsibilities, that also deserve international attention.
Hence, the ICTR offered a narrow spotlight as a result of its predetermined mandate combined with prosecutorial and judicial choice, whereas ICL more generally offers a dominant spotlight in the sense that it focuses exclusively on certain acts that carry a specific type of responsibility thereby ignoring acts that may in fact have been crucial for the turn of events. Black holes are thus to some extent the inevitable outcome of a choice by others to establish an international criminal tribunal and the point therefore is not to blame only the ICTR for not doing something it was never supposed or able to do. The main argument here is rather that there may be merit in the ICTR raising awareness of its own limits, and more broadly of the limits of ICL, and the moment of closure and legacy construction seems the right moment to do so.

Legacy-Construction as an Opportunity to Emancipate from ICL's Straightjacket
ICL, and by implication, international criminal tribunals are thus capable of telling only a limited story. They may contribute to a historical record, as the ICTR did by unequivocally establishing genocide, but certain acts, events, and contexts that are crucial to understand the complexities of what happened in Rwanda are left out of the equation as they do not fit ICL's straightjacket or a tribunal's jurisdictional strictures. But jurisdiction does not necessarily need to act as a blueprint for legacy. While ICL zeroes in, legacy-construction may be the moment to zoom out and to overcome the binary approach that ICL brings in so many ways. Legacy as the moment to open up to stories that the ICTR could not tell.
Framing legacy as an opportunity to create awareness of the ICTR's narrow spotlight and possibly to move into a space beyond ICL may be particularly important in the context of Rwanda, given its current political climate. Various scholars have exposed how the single genocide narrative (pensée unique) has by now become state ideology and how any account or narrative that deviates therefrom is branded as genocide denial or revisionism. 18 Yet, there are still many untold stories and underground narratives that do not deny the genocide as such but that just relate to different pieces of the puzzle. Those stories deserve to be told as well. The closure of the ICTR does not signify the endpoint of history. In fact, ICTR Trial Chamber I underscored as much in the Military I case when it found that conspiracy had not been proven beyond reasonable doubt as regards the accused in that case. It held: Other or newly discovered information, subsequent trials or history may demonstrate a conspiracy involving the Accused prior to 6 April to commit genocide. This Chamber's task, however, is narrowed by exacting standards of proof and procedure, the specific evidence on the record before it and its primary focus on the actions of the four Accused in this trial. In reaching its finding on conspiracy, the Chamber has considered the totality of the evidence, but a firm foundation cannot be constructed from fractured bricks. 19