The Gacaca Courts, Post-Genocide Justice and Reconciliation in Rwanda: Justice Without Lawyers.

• Author: Ramesh, Nithya
• Position: Book review

Phil Clark, The Gacaca Courts, Post-Genocide Justice and Reconciliation in Rwanda: Justice Without Lawyers (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2010) ISBN 978-0-521-19348-1, 388 pages

The use of gacaca trials in Rwanda to respond to the genocidal violence of 1994 has polarised the international community. Some human rights and international criminal lawyers have criticised gacaca for failing to provide the minimum guarantees of a fair criminal procedure which are embedded in the international human rights law (which binds Rwanda). Others have tended to romanticise gacaca as a flexible transitional justice approach which is embedded in local customary and cultural practices. Gacaca is also commonly thought to provide a functional alternative to the practical impossibility (as a result of the sheer numbers of perpetrators) of regular criminal trials or international criminal prosecutions, and which brings reconciliation benefits which cannot be attained by conventional prosecutions.

Phil Clark's book is remarkable because it cuts through much of the polemic, rhetoric and poorly substantiated positions which have featured in some of the discussion to date. Clark's book is particularly valuable because it is grounded in seven years of ethnographic field work in Rwanda, involving 500 interviews with those involved in the gacaca process. It is thus capable of assessing the promise and limits of gacaca within the affected community itself, while situating such analysis within the wider scholarly literature, the political positions of the Rwandan authorities, the disparate views of the international community (whether NGOs, international criminal justice practitioners and the UN system).

In Chapter 1, Clark situates his analysis of the gacaca trials within the broader framework of transitional justice--that is, questions of how societies address conflict and repressive rule, and how they approach reconstruction. (1) He begins by investigating the aims and objectives of the various participants in gacaca, rather than by attempting to presuppose them. Clark identifies a series of key issues discussed by his sources, and divides these into three pragmatic objectives and six profound objectives. Due to their ambiguity and complexity, Clark sets about introducing theoretical frameworks for the six profound objectives--truth, peace, justice, healing, forgiveness and reconciliation--with the caveat that this theory will go on to be informed by the...