Your Excellency, Ladies and Gentlemen, allow me to extend my warmest welcome to you to this international colloquium on the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. I am certainly pleased to greet you, to salute this audience comprising high profile personalities, who for some of them have come from afar and who are going to share with us the fruits of product of their thought and research on the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. This colloquium is the outcome or an offshoot of an exemplary cooperation between the organisers. I would like to particularly thank Bernard Chetail, who is sitting to my right, between the University of Paris I and the Institut d’Etude du Developpement of Geneva, which I am heading, and the International Academy of Human Rights or Body, which we established jointly between the University of Geneva and my institute.

I am struck by this colloquium not only because of the stature of the participants, but especially by its topical and opportune nature, because it seeks to appraise, to take stock of the achievements of the last few years and to do so discretely in a closed session meeting as per the Chartered House principles. And I do hope that this will all go well for an open discussion and an in‑depth discussion in respect of the experience of this Tribunal and also what it represents as a building block in the functioning and organisation of international justice in the coming decades.

So I would like to wish you two bright days of discussion and hope that at the end of it all you will come up with proposals to refine the international justice missionary.

Allow me to give the floor to the vice‑president of the University of Paris I, who is our co‑host.