On this day in ...... 1998, was issued the 1st judgment of conviction for genocide against a defendant who stood trial before an international tribunal. Convicted in the Trial Chamber judgment in Prosecutor v. Akayesu was the former bourgmestre, or mayor, of a Rwanda community afflicted by massacres and other atrocities in 1994. As I've written here and here, the judgment was a landmark for many reasons, among them: its ruling that "sexual violence" is a crime within the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (above left); and its teleological interpretation of the protected-groups element of the proscription codified in Article II of the 1948 Convention for the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide and included verbatim in Article 2 of the ICTR Statute. (photo credit)
(Prior September 2 posts are here, here, and here.)
