A/HRC/19/56/Add.1 pleading guilty. A survey reported that over 80 per cent of Rwandans believed that gacaca courts made positive contributions in terms of facilitating the successful reconciliation of Rwandans and delivering justice.16 30. Criticisms levelled at the gacaca system included that: it did not meet international due process standards; judges had little or no legal training being appointed only as “people of integrity”; no defence counsel was available to offenders; the process lacked safeguards to prevent false accusations; some judges, survivors and witnesses were threatened or killed; some judges were corrupt or themselves implicated in crimes; and the sentences were not proportionate to the crimes. International experts questioned the degree to which the process fulfilled obligations to prosecute genocide perpetrators. 31. The Government has responded that gacaca judges did receive training and technical assistance provided by legal experts of the National Service of gacaca Courts. Incompetent or corrupt judges were denounced and expelled. In the Government‟s view, it was most important that gacaca courts were “mainly a conciliatory justice” with simple procedures and the active participation of the concerned population. 32. Now that the gacaca process has ended, there are concerns over how new returnees will be reintegrated into their former communities and how tensions arising from their return will be handled. Many Rwandans refugees, including ex-Rwandan Armed Forces (ex-FAR) combatants and members of the interahamwe militia, have returned to Rwanda and tensions around their return have been processed through the gacaca village-level courts. The independent expert visited the Mutobo demobilization camp, where returnees from the Democratic Republic of Congo to Rwanda are following reintegration programmes before return to their old communities. She met former combatants of the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda recently returned from years spent in the Democratic Republic of Congo, who indicated that there are many others who wish to return. The winding-up of the gacaca courts may leave a crucial gap in the punishment and reintegration process. 33. With regard to gacaca, the Institute of Research and Dialogue for Peace states that: “this popular and proximity justice has inevitably hurt many people who need to be healed in order to achieve social cohesion”. 17 The Institute nevertheless concludes that it: “responds clearly to the need for justice and launches a debate on ethnic issues … it opens the wounds that need to be healed in order to achieve social cohesion. Politically speaking, it would not be fair to leave the pending post-Gacaca conflict without creating a mechanism to bring people together. The framework of debate that has been created by Gacaca is very relevant and creates opportunities to solve ethnic conflicts.”18 The Government emphasizes that a strategy to deal with any problems that may result from the conclusion of the gacaca courts is being formulated by the National Unity and Reconciliation Commission, which has started a programme known as “community dialogue” meant to deal with such issues. C. Gender-based crimes 34. It is estimated that in the region of 250,000–500,000 mostly minority Tutsi women and girls were raped during the genocide. This led to groundbreaking jurisprudence developed by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Prosecution of Persons Responsible for Genocide and Other Serious Violations of International Humanitarian Law 16 17 18 10 National Unity and Reconciliation Commission, Rwanda Reconciliation Barometer, p. 64. Institute of Research and Dialogue for Peace, “Ethnic identity and social cohesion in Rwanda: Critical analysis of political, social and economic challenges”, p. 14. Ibid., pp. 35–36.