I want to make very plane that I’m not a judge. As I was registering, I noticed in the column they indicated me as judge. I crossed it out just to be sure. I’m a senior legal officer in Chambers.
The reason I’m getting involved in this exciting discussion is I was quite interested in what Professor Reyntjens had to say. I thought I should perhaps come in from the perspective of someone who was in the OTP in 1997, 1998, 1999 with Pierre Prosper, who is sitting there, with Mr. Muna and Mr. Othman.
Mr. Othman this morning spoke about the strategy in the OTP Prosecution strategy at the time. And he spoke to some of the components of it. And one of those components that he spoke about was the component of the one genocide policy. I remember us meeting, all the legal staff in the OTP, once every Friday, I believe, in the boardroom discussing the legal strategies and all that.
One of the things that came out of that was that all the indictments at the time had the count of genocide in them. Mr. Othman can speak to this. He was one of our bosses in those days. All of them had the count of genocide in it. And of course that was consistent with the idea of the Rwandan genocide.
Perhaps that is one perspective from which one can try to understand the difficulty that Mr. Reyntjens spoke to. If you had every indictment that had the count of genocide in it and you had limited resources and limited time span within which to do the work, it seemed obvious that there’s something political as well about the choice that says, well, you have to defer a certain trial of genocide, especially if you didn’t have unlimited amount of Judges to try this case and unlimited amount of courtrooms. You had to defer trial on a genocide indictment so that you could try another case that didn’t have a genocide count, such as a trial that contained war crime charges only or more or less something like that. I think that is one angle from which one can understand it.
Of course, I cannot speak to the prevailing think at this time. Thank you.