News from the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda:

“With significant law reform, we’ve been able finally to convince the judges that the legal framework in this country adequately provides fair trial for any of the accused who is sent over to this country,” ICTR prosecutor Hassan Bubacar Jallow told a news conference in the Rwandan capital, Kigali.

…

“Our justice system has come of age,” Rwanda’s Prosecutor General Martin Ngoga said. “For us, this is more than just transferring one case.”

“It is opening doors for many other cases to flow in. It is time to bring Rwandan cases home to Rwanda.”

There’s a positive and a negative spin to this announcement.

First the positive: Moving cases to Rwanda means that Rwandans can have a closer connection to the justice process and might feel, more than they have in the past, that they’re seeing justice done rather than simply hearing about it on occasion as news arrives from Tanzania. What’s more, this will almost certainly help move cases forward more quickly, since there’s a backlog and since the ICRT has been glacial in its work. And, of course, it’s a vote of confidence in the Rwandan justice system which has effectively been rebuilt from the ground up since 1994.

Now the negative: Human rights groups are already suggesting that cases transfered from the Arusha tribunal are less likely to hold up to international standards of justice. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the claim is that getting a fair shake from a Rwandan court on a genocide charge is near to impossible. This is necessarily a knock on the Rwandan justice system, though it will surely be interpreted that way; it’s mostly the recognition that the wound of 1994 isn’t one that’s healed yet or even likely to heal any time soon.

This will be interesting and important to watch over time.