Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I just want to highlight what the interpreter said by citing I had the privilege of following the Akayesu case some time ago, where a victim, a witness, was unable to mention what’s related to sexual violence because of the sensitivity of the translation in her language. In that case, an inadequate interpretation may slow down the trial. For instance, in the Rwandan culture, the word "sexual violence" may be interchangeable with the word "marriage". A woman, on whom sexual violence is exercised, may actually say "I was married." So it took some time for people to understand the slight differences.
So, as Mr. Kwende said, he mentioned social and cultural knowledge of the country at the investigations stage. So it is important to have the right technology from the investigation phase right up to the judgement, because if the use of words slows down the proceedings, there are also words that may also lead to a wrong legal interpretation. For instance, the word “kurongora”, as I said, it’s some kind of trivialization of sexual crimes in our country. They were considered normal, like a “kind of marriage”.
So it shows you just how far the philosophy of rape is almost tolerated in our culture. And maybe the persons who committed those rapes do not think anything of it. They thought it was something like “war loot”. So a better knowledge of the culture could give deeper explanations to the proceedings in court.