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32 4 Lines of Defense To defend the right of a defendant to a fair trial is to fight for an international justice that will not become the laughingstock of its critics the very next day. Jean-Marie Biju-Duval, lawyer for Ferdinand Nahimana, March 2004 Besides convicting the bourgmestre of Taba, the Akayesu judgment also removed a fundamental obstacle by providing clear and definitive legal recognition of the crime committed against the Tutsis in Rwanda. It constituted a judicial record of the 1994 genocide of the Rwandan Tutsis, giving the “crime of all crimes” against this segment of the Rwandan population the reality and binding force of res judicata. This recognition was a crucial part of the ICTR’s work, one of its raisons d’être. Prior to the September 1998 judgment, numerous reports, books, and articles had clearly defined the highly specific nature of the crime against the Tutsis in Rwanda. According to a large segment of international public opinion and the vast majority of UN member states, this was the third recognized genocide of the century, following the Armenian genocide in 1915 and the genocide of Jews and Gypsies at the beginning of the 1940s. The Akayesu judgment legally defined the crime of all crimes committed in Rwanda and gave it the universal value of a verdict rendered by an international tribunal. This is precisely what some had hoped to prevent. Shortly after the ICTR issued its first indictments, a handful of lawyers met at a hotel in Nairobi at the beginning of July 1996. The meeting was organized by Luc de Temmerman, a Belgian lawyer who had been in charge of the affairs of part of Rwanda’s presidential family since the beginning  of the 1990s. He had an insider’s connection with the former regime’s elites who had been ousted and were now scattered to the four corners of Africa and Europe. For a year and a half, he had been making the rounds from Cameroon to Belgium gathering powers of attorney from former dignitaries likely to run into trouble with the UN tribunal for Rwanda. He had collected at least 150 duly signed powers of attorney placing him in charge of their defense should they face prosecution. De Temmerman liked to flaunt a mix of obscure financial interests and fiendish political convictions. Intriguing and paradoxical, he claimed that he often paid for cases out of his own pocket but barely concealed the fact that he was actually making money. He zealously trumpeted the “Hutu cause” but quietly favored the classic, anti-immigration ideology near and dear to the European extreme right. However, there was one thing that he claimed unequivocally : loyalty to his friends and his commitments. Whether in Canada, France, or Côte d’Ivoire, he worked tirelessly to mobilize colleagues on behalf of his Rwandan clients, some of whom, such as militia leader Georges Rutaganda, were being prosecuted by the ICTR. The goal of de Temmerman’s meeting in Nairobi was to establish a defense strategy. He was marshalling the help of his colleagues not for the sake of the law but rather for a political fight. To him, the courtroom was just another forum to advance the “Hutu cause” and ensure that Rwandan history was written according to this view. And while he was the key driver in organizing the meeting in the summer of 1996, it was financed by a movement called Rassemblement pour le retour des réfugiés et de la démocratie au Rwanda (Party for the Return of Refugees and Democracy to Rwanda), a group that had become the primary vehicle for reorganizing the Hutu elites in exile. De Temmerman unveiled his strategic objective for a shared and dedicated defense (including plans to pay a substantial commission from the legal fees back to “the cause”) to the handful of lawyers in attendance. The key goal of this joint defense approach was to negate the genocide of the Tutsis. De Temmerman was not a specialist in criminal law, and he knew it. He was not interested in the details of case files, charges, and procedures. He was happy to delegate the day-to-day management of the trials to others. His role was to coordinate and supervise this common political defense. Just before the trials opened, he made sure that everyone was marching to the same beat. “Upon my formal appointment in the Akayesu case, de Temmerman cautioned me that I was...

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