Transcript of June 7 - Peter Robinson

KAREMERA ET AL MONDAY, 7 JUNE 2010
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MR. PRESIDENT:
You may.
MR. ROBINSON:
Thank you. I think the things that Mr. Webster has said are important to address, and I think they need
to be rebutted. And I appreciate the spirit in which he's made his comments, and I don't have any
problem with what he's said, and he's doing his job.
First of all, I think really if Mr. Erlinder was arrested for his representation of Victoire Ingabire, who's a
candidate for president in Rwanda, or for his lawsuit against President Kagame in the United States, I
never would have made that motion and I wouldn't be standing here asking the ICTR to do anything
about it.
While I might sympathise with Mr. Erlinder's plight, I wouldn't see it as the role of the ICTR to be
intervening in matters between Rwanda that don't really concern it. But the fact is that what
Mr. Erlinder is charged with -- and those charges were read to him on Friday -- deal exclusively with the
comments and papers he's written in connection with his representation of Major Ntabakuze at the
ICTR.
And so, therefore, as a factual matter, the Tribunal is implicated and involved. And Rwanda is a
member state of the United Nations, and they have an obligation not to take action which interferes with
a fair trial in this Tribunal. And a fair trial is impossible under these circumstances, not only for
Mr. Erlinder's client, who finds his lawyer locked up, but for all of us, and Mr. Nzirorera, in particular,
whose defence is that there was no state-sponsored genocide in Rwanda.
So I just leave you with five words: I can't do my job. Thank you.
MR. WEYL:
Mr. President, I have listened to Mr. Webster, and he has somehow addressed some of our objections.
But the crux of the matter remains that we know that Peter Erlinder was first charged in respect of
statements he had made. That is already documented and is beyond any controversy. But we also
know that some emotions were stirred because of these charges and it is for those reasons that the
Rwandan authorities tried to circumvent the lawyer's immunity by introducing new elements.
Maybe I did not say this a short while ago, but let me say it now. The communiqué of the spokesperson
of the Tribunal was rather distressful for me, because it simply said that the Tribunal was concerned
about Mr. Erlinder's situation, but that Mr. Erlinder was not on mission for the Tribunal and that he was
being charged for reasons that were not connected to the Tribunal. He went on to say that the Tribunal
was going to contact the Rwandan authorities to find out whether there were any elements in those
JEAN BAIGENT - ICTR - TRIAL CHAMBER III - page 11