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This Court
Sentences You ...
Trial Court Delivers
Judgment in the First
Finnish Genocide Case
T
recall an article from our previous
issue, covering the prosecution of a Burundian-born
Finnish resident for his alleged role in the Rwandan
genocide. On June , a unanimous three-judge
by Rain Liivoja
panel of the District Court of Itä-Uusimaa found Mr
François Bazaramba guilty of genocide and sentenced
him to life imprisonment. While the court was not
convinced that the defendant had personally killed
anyone, it did fi nd that Mr Bazaramba had on several
occasions incited and ordered violence against the
Tutsi, coordinated the use of road blocks and night
patrols against them, assisted in the burning of their
homes, and participated in the distribution of their
property — all with the intention of destroying the
Tutsi as a group.
e -page judgment makes for dense reading but
predictably does not raise any particularly thorny legal
issues. e court dealt with its competence to hear the
matter — something that troubled many — on a single
page. It relied on universal jurisdiction, a principle
which gives each and every state the power to prosecute
the most serious crimes against international law, gen-
ocide being the prime example. e alternative charges
of murder were jurisdictionally more challenging. But
here the court pointed to a provision of Finnish law
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Rain Liivoja is a Research Fellow at the Asia-Pacifi c Centre for
Military Law, Melbourne Law School, and the o in Global
Governance Research. He is also a Visiting Lecturer in Interna-
tional Law at the Estonian National Defence College.
that embodies the principle of vicarious administra-
tion of justice. is allows Finland to prosecute an
off ence perpetrated abroad if the off ender is found in
Finland but cannot be extradited. e precondition is
that the act must have been punishable at the place
of commission. at, in this instance, the Rwandan
authorities duly confi rmed.
e biggest challenges facing the court were evi-
dentiary. Notably, judges had to address the defence’s
claim that some of the witnesses — themselves geno-
cide suspects before Rwandan courts — had given their
statements under torture. While the court conceded
that prison conditions in Rwanda had been partly
inhumane, it believed this to have resulted from over-
crowding, not coercive attempts to extract testimony.
However, the court did set aside the testimony of
two witnesses in light of specifi c allegations of actual
torture.
As for the punishment, the judges noted that, had
the intent to destroy the Tutsi not been there, some
of the acts perpetrated by Mr Bazaramba would have
still amounted to murder. For murder, however, a life
imprisonment would be appropriate, so the court
found it impossible to apply any other punishment
in this case.
is line of reasoning makes perfect sense: if geno-
cide is the most serious crime, it deserves the most
serious penalty available. However, there is room for
doubt as to whether a fairly low-level perpetrator such
as Mr Bazaramba would have been given a life sen-
tence by an international tribunal. is, however, raises
the broader question about equality before the law if
crimes perpetrated in the same context are prosecuted
before a variety of national and international bodies.
Both the prosecution and defence have appealed
the decision, so this is certainly not the last we hear
of Mr Bazaramba.