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| Dennis Byron elected president of UN tribunal for Rwanda | ARUSHA, Rwanda (AFP): Judges at the UN court trying leaders of the 1994 Rwandan genocide elected Judge Dennis Byron of St Kitts and Nevis to preside over the tribunal, the court's press service said Monday.
He was elected for a two-year mandate, starting May 29, during a plenary session of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), at its headquarters in the northern Tanzanian town of Arusha.
He replaces Judge Erik Mose of Norway, who was elected in 2003 and re-elected in 2005.
Judge Byron was born in 1943 and studied law at Cambridge University in Britain before later serving as Chief Justice of the Eastern Caribbean Supreme Court. He was nominated to the ICTR in 2003.
Judge Khalida Rachid Khan of Pakistan was on Monday elected vice-president of the ICTR, to replace Judge Arlette Ramaroson of Madagascar. ~~adz:Right~~
The ICTR is due to wind up all trials, excluding appeals hearings, by the end of 2008. It has decided to transfer less serious cases to national courts in order to respect that deadline.
Since it was founded in 1994, the court has convicted 28 suspects and acquitted five.
Some 800,000 people, most of them ethnic Tutsis, were killed within six weeks by extremist members of the Hutu ethnic group in the 1994 Rwandan genocide, according to UN figures.
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