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Gacaca: Rwanda's Experiment in Community-Based Justice for Genocide Crimes Comes to a Close
DEVELOPMENTS In the next six months, Rwanda will complete the most comprehensive post-conflict justice program attempted anywhere in the world. Since 2001, 11,000 community-based courts known as gacaca (pronounced ga-CHA-cha), which are overseen by locally-elected judges and forbid any participation by lawyers, have prosecuted around 400,000 suspected perpetrators of the 1994 genocide. Nearly every Rwandan adult has participated in gacaca in some way, either as a witness, defendant, or by attending weekly hearings. Under gacaca’s plea-bargaining scheme, the vast majority of those convicted of genocide crimes have either had their sentences commuted to community service or, if they were imprisoned, have been reintegrated into the same communities where they committed crimes and now live side-by-side with genocide survivors and their families.