Hirondelle News Agency (Lausanne)
13 April 2006
Arusha — A former mayor in Rwanda who had pleaded guilty was Thursday sentenced to 15 years in prison by the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) for his role in the 1994 genocide.
Rwanda government estimates put the number of dead between April and July 1994 to over a million people, most of them members of the Tutsi ethnic group.
Paul Bisengimana, the former mayor of Gikoro (central Rwanda) had pleaded guilty to murder and extermination for massacres of Tutsi civilians after striking a plea bargain with the prosecutor.
According to the terms of the agreement, the accused would serve a sentence of between 12 and 14 years in jail.
According to Bisengimana's lawyer, Catherine Mabille, the heavy sentence "would discourage other accused from entering plea-bargaining ".
"A sentence higher than the limit agreed upon is justified by the crime of extermination", said Judge Arlette Ramaroson from Madagascar who presided the judgment and sentencing. She was assisted by Judge William Sekule of Tanzania and Judge Solomy Balungi Bossa from Uganda.
In meting out the sentence, the judges considered the gravity of the crime, the number of victims (over one thousand), the position held by the accused in the commune, and the fact that he was educated.
The tribunal sentenced Bisengimana on the crime of extermination and chose to drop the court of murder as a crime against humanity.
The former mayor becomes the 27th person to be tried by the ICTR and the fifth to plead guilty. 22 others chose to plead not guilty. He was arrested in Mali on December 4, 2001.
"They could have remained within the limit of 12 and 14 years, but handing down 15 years makes no sense unless the judges wanted to show their independence", stated the visibly angry Mabille.
"I was not surprised", said Charles Adeogun-Phillips who led the prosecution. "It looked like judges were very eager to assert their independence, but where does this lead us? The accused might be reluctant to make an agreement with the prosecution".
Adeogun-Phillips continued that by going beyond the agreed sentence limits, the tribunal puts the prosecution in a bind.
"That in effect reduces our ability to negotiate and propose to the accused the range of sentence which he might expect in the event of pleading guilty", he said.
While welcoming the sentence given to Bisengimana, Rwanda's special representative to the ICTR, Aloys Mutabingwa was not happy that the count of genocide was being dropped by the prosecutor in his guilty-plea arrangements.
"Given that the ICTR targets only a few accused who masterminded the Rwanda genocide, we are strongly of the view that agreeing to exclude genocide in the guilty plea is extremely prejudicial", he said, urging the ICTR to "ensure that the guilty plea bargaining does not vitiate the trial of a crime that constitutes the core of its own establishment".
The tribunal, which has the plan to wind up its cases by 2008, has been counting on guilty pleas to speed up the trials of the remaining 15 people to be tried. 28 others are currently on trial.
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