THE HAGUE, Netherlands — United Nations courts established to pursue justice for war crimes during Yugoslavia’s brutal breakup in the early 1990s and Rwanda’s 1994 genocide concluded their final proceedings Wednesday, marking the end of a multi-decade international justice effort.
Presiding Judge Iain Bonomy called the session “a truly historic milestone,” officially closing proceedings related to Félicien Kabuga, the suspected genocide financier who passed away Saturday.
Kabuga, believed to be in his 90s with disputed exact age and battling severe dementia, had been held at the United Nations detention center in The Hague after being declared unfit for trial in 2023. No nation agreed to accept him, extending his case indefinitely.
Lucy Gaynor, a historian at the University of Amsterdam, described the Kabuga case being the final proceeding as “symbolic of the state of international justice,” noting the field currently faces crisis.
“Countries put limits on what they are willing to do,” she said.
Medical experts had determined travel posed too great a risk for Kabuga, and despite tribunal efforts, no neighboring nations offered him asylum, leaving him in legal uncertainty.
His death occurred exactly six years after his 2020 arrest near Paris, following nearly twenty years as a fugitive.
Kabuga’s matter was the final active case at the International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals, the UN-operated entity that assumed remaining cases when the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda closed in 2015 and the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia ended operations in 2017.
These twin tribunals, both created by UN Security Council mandate in the early 1990s, secured convictions against 155 individuals for atrocity crimes and established groundwork for the International Criminal Court’s 2002 creation.
Situated just 2 miles from the former insurance facility that housed the residual mechanism, the ICC was designed as a permanent global court to prosecute humanity’s gravest crimes and eliminate the need for conflict-specific ad hoc tribunals.
U.S. President Donald Trump has imposed sanctions on the ICC for pursuing investigations involving American and Israeli officials, as neither country belongs to the court’s 125-member coalition.
Multiple nations have declined to apprehend Russian President Vladimir Putin and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, both subjects of ICC arrest warrants, while Italy refused to surrender a Libyan warlord last year, instead returning him to Tripoli via government aircraft.
For Rwandans, Kabuga’s death underscores accountability system failures. Genocide survivor Agnes Mukamurenzi, who was familiar with Kabuga, believed he deserved prolonged imprisonment. “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,” she told AP.
Wednesday’s 12-minute session occurred in an adapted conference room one floor above the building’s main courtroom, where Ratko Mladic, the military leader dubbed the “Butcher of Bosnia,” received a genocide conviction and Croat commander Slobodan Praljak consumed lethal poison during an appeal hearing.
The residual mechanism abandoned the courtroom last year, reducing to minimal staff, and now confronts an uncertain future. Its authorization expires in June without any transition plan for remaining responsibilities, including monitoring detention conditions for 41 individuals still serving sentences.
The fate of millions of archived document pages and thousands of evidence items remains unclear, including Mladic’s personal handwritten diaries and copies of the inflammatory newspaper Kangura that Kabuga allegedly funded.
In January, Trump withdrew the U.S. from the organization, eliminating millions in financial backing.
Upon learning of Kabuga’s death, Dr. Philibert Gakwenzire, who leads IBUKA, the umbrella organization representing survivors of the 1994 Rwanda Genocide, stated that although Kabuga died without facing trial, “history is the true judge.”
