The Prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda is Mr Hassan Bubacar Jallow (Gambia). He was appointed by the Security Council on 15 September 2003. The Office of the Prosecutor is based in Arusha, Tanzania.
The Deputy Prosecutor is Mr. Bongani Majola (South Africa).
The Office is divided into two divisions:
- The Prosecution Division, headed by a Chief of Prosecutions, which is comprised of:
- The Investigation Section is divided into teams responsible for collecting evidence implicating individuals in crimes committed in Rwanda in 1994, falling within the Tribunal’s jurisdiction;
- Trial teams headed by Senior Trial Attorneys, responsible for handling cases at the trial level; and
- The Appeals and Legal Advisory Division (ALAD), headed by a Chief of ALAD, which is responsible for:
- Handling all appeals by the Prosecutor from final judgment or sentence, and to respond to all defence appeals against conviction or sentence;
- Providing legal advise to trial teams and senior management in the OTP on matters pertaining to questions of substantive international and national criminal law, evidence, procedure, trial strategy and tactics, disclosure, witness protection, ethics, policy, and other issues; and
- Ensuring continuing legal education within the OTP, through a monthly legal forum, the OTP database of ICTR and ICTY decisions, et
The Information and Evidence Support Section (IESS), reports directly to the Deputy Prosecutor.
Prosecutor of the ICTR
Born in the Gambia in 1950 Hassan B. Jallow, studied law at the University of Dar es Salaam Tanzania (1973), the Nigerian Law School (1976) and the University College, London (1978). He worked as State Attorney in the Attorney Generals’ Chambers in the Gambia from 1976 until 1982 when he was appointed Solicitor General.
Justice Hassan Bubacar Jallow served as Gambia’s Attorney-General and Minister of Justice from 1984 to 1994 and subsequently as a Judge of the Gambia’s Supreme Court from 1998 - 2002. In 1998, he was appointed by the United Nations Secretary General to serve as an international legal expert and carry out a judicial evaluation of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda and the International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia. He also has served as a legal expert for the Organisation of African Unity and worked on the drafting and conclusion of the African Charter on Human and People’s Rights which was adopted in 1981. He has also served the Commonwealth in various respects including chairing the Governmental Working Group of Experts in Human Rights. Until his appointment as Prosecutor to the ICTR, Justice Jallow was a Judge of the Appeals Chamber of the Special Court for Sierra Leone on the appointment of the UN Secretary-General in 2002 as well as a member of the Commonwealth Secretariat Arbitral Tribunal. Justice Jallow was awarded the honour of Commander of the National Order of the Republic of Gambia.
(South Africa)
Deputy Prosecutor of the ICTR
Bongani Majola is the Deputy Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. Before joining the ICTR, Bongani Majola was the Executive Director of the Legal Resources Center, a non-profit public interest law firm which represents the poor and uses litigation to strengthen constitutional rights through the decisions of the Constitutional Court of South Africa.
Among others, he was involved in the Treatment Action Campaign trial which sought to give meaning to the constitutional provisions dealing with the right of access by poor people to medical care. Bongani Majola was also professor and dean of the faculty of law at the University of the North in the Limpopo province in South Africa. During part of that time, he was also a member of the committee of experts advising members of the Constitutional Assembly which drew the current South African Constitution.
Before going into the academic world, Mr. Majola had practiced law as a presiding judicial officer (magistrate} in the lower courts and had also spent years prosecuting in those courts. He also has experience as a court interpreter. For many years he sat with Judges, as an assessor, in many criminal trials in the High Courts of South Africa trying a variety of offences, including murder, robbery, rape and other serious offences. Academically, Bongani Majola holds an LLM degree from Harvard University in the United States of America, in addition to the Bachelor of Laws and B. Iuris degrees from the University of Zululand in South Africa. He was a visiting professor at the School of Advance International Studies at Johns Hopkins University in 1990 and a research fellow at Yale University in 1993.