Rule of Law Amid Lawlessness: Counseling the Accused in Rwanda's Domestic Genocide Trials

This article, by way of personal narrative, sets out my experiences with Legal Aid Rwanda in February and March of 1998. In doing so, it describes, from a defense counsel perspective, an attempt to create due process within a procedural void. Legal Aid Rwanda's mandate focused not on the handful of detainees actually selected to proceed to trial, but rather on the vast numbers languishing in prison. In the end, my experiences lead me to question the merit of a courtroom in addressing mass crimes, of adjudication as a device to promote national reconciliation in a post-genocidal society, and of Prosecutor-General Rwagasore's imperative that trials and death sentences “must be carried out” so that Rwandans understand, paradoxically, that “the life of a person cannot be trampled on.”