On October 31, 2024, Prosecutor General, Angélique Habyarimana participated and delivered the Keynote Address at the second “Day of Law” Conference organized by the French Embassy in Rwanda, on the theme “The Making of Law: Genocides and Crimes Against Humanity.”

The conference brought together various legal professionals, representatives of the diplomatic community, journalists, French, Rwandan, and international nationals.

Philippe Sands, a Franco-British International Lawyer and author of “Return to Lemberg, Return of Lvouv”, explained the origins of the legal concepts of genocide and crimes against humanity coined respectively by Raphael Lemkin and Hersch Lauterpacht in the aftermath of the Holocaust and the Nuremberg Trials.

In her keynote address, the Prosecutor General presented how the crimes of genocide and crimes against humanity were introduced into the Rwandan penal code in 1996, by the Organic Law on the Organization of Prosecutions of Offenses Constituting the Crime of Genocide or Crimes Against Humanity, Committed Between October 1, 1990, and December 31, 1994, adopted on August 30, 1996.

"This law marks a significant change in the fight against impunity that had characterized Rwanda for several decades before the genocide perpetrated against the Tutsi in 1994," the Prosecutor General highlighted.

                                  Participants following a presentation during the conference

The Prosecutor General also recalled that the effort to rebuild the judicial system in the aftermath of the genocide has made possible to prosecute genocide suspects, but hundreds of thousands of genocide suspects are still at large in foreign countries, in Africa, on the European continent, in the USA, Canada and Australia.

She emphasized that there is a need for complementarity and joint efforts to prosecute, judge, or extradite fugitives based on the international obligations of each state under the 1948 Genocide Convention.