Lawyer Dov Jacobs advised judges on the Worldwide Residual Mechanism for Prison Tribunals that the case in opposition to Félicien Kabuga was constructed on “weak, unverified, unauthenticated, unsubstantiated proof riddled with unverified rumour.”
The protection opening assertion got here a day after prosecutors opened Kabuga’s trial by saying he performed “a central function in scary hatred of Tutsis, dehumanizing harmless civilians and paving the best way for genocide.”
Kabuga has pleaded not responsible to costs of genocide, incitement to commit genocide, conspiracy to commit genocide in addition to persecution, extermination and homicide. If convicted, he faces a most sentence of life imprisonment.
“This trial will present that the prosecution takes a really free method to corroboration,” Jacobs stated. “It must be famous that lots of the prosecution’s allegations are uncorroborated, which raises critical doubts as to the power of the prosecution case.”
Kabuga, 87, didn’t present up in court docket for the primary two days of his trial, amid an ongoing battle about his authorized illustration. He’s the final main suspect within the genocide to face trial on the U.N. court docket.
He was arrested close to Paris in Could 2020 after years on the run from justice and transferred to the mechanism, a court docket in The Hague that offers with remaining circumstances from the now-closed U.N. tribunals for Rwanda and the Balkan wars. Kabuga’s attorneys argued unsuccessfully that he was not match to face trial.
The mass killing of Rwanda’s Tutsi minority was triggered on April 6, 1994, when a aircraft carrying President Juvénal Habyarimana was shot down and crashed within the capital, Kigali, killing the chief who, like nearly all of Rwandans, was an ethnic Hutu.
Tutsis had been blamed for downing the aircraft. Bands of Hutu extremists started slaughtering Tutsis and their perceived supporters, with assist from the military, police, and militias. In a 100-day genocide, some 800,000 folks had been killed, a lot of them hacked to loss of life with machetes.
Kabuga, was considered one of Rwanda’s wealthiest businessmen and had shut hyperlinks to the political elite on the time the genocide unfolded. He’s accused of inciting genocide utilizing the Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines (RTLM) broadcaster he helped set up and of elevating funds and shopping for weapons and different provides for the Hutu militias generally known as the Interahamwe.
However his attorneys dispute that model of occasions and advised judges the prosecution case was constructed to implicate Kabuga.
Protection lawyer Emmanuel Altit stated prosecutors constructed a defective narrative “across the title of Félicien Kabuga To show him into the right wrongdoer.”
The primary prosecution witness is scheduled to testify subsequent week in a trial that’s anticipated to final many months.
