The United Nations courts established to prosecute atrocities committed during the violent breakup of Yugoslavia in the early 1990s and the 1994 Rwandan genocide convened their final session on Wednesday, concluding a decades-long pursuit of international justice. Presiding Judge Iain Bonomy described the hearing as “a truly historic milestone,” formally ending proceedings involving Félicien Kabuga, the alleged financier of the genocide, who passed away on Saturday.
Kabuga, believed to be in his 90s—though his exact age is contested—and suffering from severe dementia, had been held at the UN detention facility in The Hague after being declared unfit to stand trial in 2023. No country was willing to accept him, prolonging the case. Lucy Gaynor, a historian at the University of Amsterdam, noted that the Kabuga case being the final proceeding is “symbolic of the state of international justice,” which is currently facing a crisis. “Countries put limits on what they are willing to do,” she explained.
Kabuga remained in legal limbo after doctors deemed travel too risky, and no nearby nations offered asylum despite the tribunal's efforts. He died exactly six years after his arrest near Paris in 2020, following nearly two decades on the run. His case was the last active proceeding at the International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals, the UN body that assumed remaining cases from the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (closed in 2015) and the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (closed in 2017).
The two tribunals, established by the UN Security Council in the 1990s, convicted 155 individuals for atrocity crimes and paved the way for the International Criminal Court (ICC), founded in 2002. Located just two miles from the residual mechanism's former insurance building, the ICC was created as a permanent global court to prosecute humanity's worst crimes and avoid the need for ad hoc tribunals. However, the ICC has faced challenges, including sanctions from US President Donald Trump for investigating officials from the US and Israel, both non-member states. Several countries have also refused to arrest Russian President Vladimir Putin and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, both subject to ICC warrants, and Italy declined to extradite a Libyan warlord last year.
For Rwandans, Kabuga's death underscores the shortcomings of accountability. Genocide survivor Agnes Mukamurenzi, who knew Kabuga, stated, “I wish he lived longer in prison to feel the pain. During the genocide, he played a key role that saw many innocent lives taken.” The 12-minute sitting on Wednesday took place in a modified conference room above the main courtroom, where Ratko Mladic, the “Butcher of Bosnia,” was convicted of genocide, and Croat commander Slobodan Praljak fatally poisoned himself during an appeal.
The residual mechanism vacated the courtroom last year, reducing to a skeleton staff, and now faces an uncertain future. Its mandate expires in June, with no transition plan for remaining functions, including overseeing the detention of 41 individuals still serving sentences. The fate of millions of pages of documents and thousands of evidence items—including Mladic's handwritten diaries and copies of the newspaper Kangura, which Kabuga allegedly funded—remains unclear. In January, Trump withdrew the US from the organization, cutting millions in financial support. Dr. Philibert Gakwenzire, head of IBUKA, the umbrella group for survivors of the 1994 Rwanda Genocide, remarked that while Kabuga died without trial, “history is the true judge.”
