View Video | Voices from the Rwanda Tribunal

Ayodeji Fadugba
speaks on ...

criticisms of investigators, especially early approaches to investigation

Transcript

0:00

When this office started, I think – and it, it goes more (___), to people who are new in the organization, who’ve just joined the ICTR, are the people who are likely to come in and make these kind of judgments you’re talking about. “Who the heck wrote this investigator’s notes . . . who the heck took this statement, what were they thinking of?”

0:20

But if you’ve been here for long and you know the conditions under which people operated at the time, they weren’t looking for anything in particular. You see they came in to a place where there had been a lot of killings. They weren’t looking for anything in particu-, you see what I’m saying?

0:36

Now if you go out into the field, you have a pretty, a pretty good idea. You know, the case, there’s jurisprudence all over the place, for instance, for some crime scenes, for how the events unfolded so the way you investigate is different. For people who were just unleashed into Kigali and who went all over the place asking questions, the clarity that we have now is not there.

0:58

So that is – there used to – the, the, the judgment about this good investigator, bad investigator tends to come from people who’ve just joined the organization. And of course I think also the difference in the legal tradition from which the lawyers are coming from; the civil law, the common law, the tension even amongst the lawyers is also there amongst the investigators in the way they in-, they, they set out to investigate. So that’s more like an institutional thing.