Popular Rwandan courts charged with trying the majority of alleged perpetrators of the genocide of Tutsis in 1994 will finish their work in December, said the Rwandan Justice Minister Tharcisse Karugarama. "A final report will be completed in December and this chapter of the gacaca will be officially declared closed," said a statement from the Minister of Justice, released Friday on the official website of the Rwandan government.
The end of the work of these people's courts had been repeatedly postponed because of the complexity of some cases, many use and discovery of new facts. According to the National Service of Gacaca Courts (NSGC), a state body responsible for coordinating and monitoring the activity of these courts, there were still ninety-seven caseload in early May, these records shall be judged by July.
"The gacaca have allowed relatives of genocide suspects to sit down with the survivors to judge fairly, those who committed these crimes, welcomed the minister. With gacaca, we have determined up to 1, 4 million records, an achievement that would have been impossible otherwise, "says Rwandan official.
"There were prison sentences ranging from five to ten years of life sentences totaling 5-8% of the verdicts and acquittals totaling 20 to 30%," he detailed. Gacaca pilots have been implemented since 2001, but in March 2005 that the first trials before the gacaca courts began in one hundred and six pilots, before spreading to the entire territory.
Gacaca is competent to try all perpetrators of genocide, with the exception of planners at national and prefectural levels, within the jurisdiction of regular courts. Volunteers, gacaca judges are not professional judges but people deemed honest, elected by the community. Some of them however have themselves been accused of genocide, then tried and convicted or acquitted.
Others were caught in the act of bribery by defendants or their family members. 
The end of the work of these people's courts had been repeatedly postponed because of the complexity of some cases, many use and discovery of new facts. According to the National Service of Gacaca Courts (NSGC), a state body responsible for coordinating and monitoring the activity of these courts, there were still ninety-seven caseload in early May, these records shall be judged by July.
"The gacaca have allowed relatives of genocide suspects to sit down with the survivors to judge fairly, those who committed these crimes, welcomed the minister. With gacaca, we have determined up to 1, 4 million records, an achievement that would have been impossible otherwise, "says Rwandan official.
"There were prison sentences ranging from five to ten years of life sentences totaling 5-8% of the verdicts and acquittals totaling 20 to 30%," he detailed. Gacaca pilots have been implemented since 2001, but in March 2005 that the first trials before the gacaca courts began in one hundred and six pilots, before spreading to the entire territory.
Gacaca is competent to try all perpetrators of genocide, with the exception of planners at national and prefectural levels, within the jurisdiction of regular courts. Volunteers, gacaca judges are not professional judges but people deemed honest, elected by the community. Some of them however have themselves been accused of genocide, then tried and convicted or acquitted.
Others were caught in the act of bribery by defendants or their family members.
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