RWANDA MEDIA TRIAL

If anyone has a copy of the opinion handed down by the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, I'd love to see it.

I gather that everyone agrees that the individuals involved -- Ferdinand Nahimana, Hassan Ngeze, and Jean-Bosco Barayagwiza -- should be punished for their role in the genocide. They helped to coordinate the killings and they incited horrific violence. Joel Simon reports in Slate, however, that Ngeze's lawyer, John Floyd, has raised concerns about the reasoning behind the opinion. In addition, Simon writes:

While press-freedom advocates do not dispute the court's verdict, some question the tribunal's legal reasoning, which could provide cover to repressive governments around the world that routinely suppress criticism and dissent by using overly broad restrictions on hate speech and incitement. Parts of the decision could also provide ammunition to U.S. critics of the newly created International Criminal Court in The Hague who believe that international law is a threat to U.S. legal standards. (Via Eugene Volokh.)

For some background on the case, see Dina Temple-Raston's article here. See also here. Full warning: my comments here are not profound; I'm just trying to work out some thoughts on legal concepts in general. It seems to me that at least two things are critical about this trial: first of all, it is retrospective, looking backward to punish individuals who can reasonably be said to have had a causal role in the genocide. There is a basic tension between forward-looking rules and backward-looking proceedings, and the gravity of the case helps to highlight that tension. In addition, the social context matters a lot, as Temple-Raston's piece helps to show. It's very hard to cover widely divergent social contexts with general rules; international tribunals might suffer from a particular difficulty in this regard, to the extent that rules that may be appropriate in the context of Rwandan genocide (hate speech is part of the causal nexus and must be punished) are not appropriate in the context of clashes between European governments employing hate speech standards and the U.S. music industry (to take one of Simon's admittedly "remote" hypotheticals). This does not mean, however, that the "concept" of hate speech is defective, as such -- surely it is useful for articulating deeply felt intuitions about what was going on in Rwanda in the early 1990s.