Abstract
The Rwandan genocide of 1994 occurred due to widespread complicity. I will argue that complicity can be the basis for legal liability, even for criminal liability, if two conditions are met. First, the person’s actions or inactions must be causally efficacious at least in the sense that had the person not committed these actions or inactions the harm would have been made significantly less likely to occur. Second, the person must know that her actions or inactions risk contributing to a harmful enterprise, and must intend that these actions or inactions risk making this contribution. But it is not part of this analysis that the defendant must intend the harmful result. I explore the boundaries between legal and moral complicity and end with a discussion of how the analysis defended in the paper affects such questions as how many people in Rwanda should be prosecuted for the genocide which occurred due to widespread complicity.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
Quoting Protais Musoni, Minister of Local Government, Good Governance, Community Development, and Social Affairs, Kigali, 13 June 2006.
I am grateful to Mark Drumbl for this point.
References
Clark, Phil. 2005. When the killers come home. Dissent Summer: 14–21.
Clark, Phil. 2007. Hybridity, holism and ‘traditional’ justice: The case of the Gacaca Courts in post-genocide Rwanda. George Washington University Law Review 39(4).
Coney v. R. 1882. 8 QBD 534.
Douglas, Lawrence. 2001. The memory of judgment: Making law and history in the trials of the Holocaust. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Drumbl, Mark. 2005. Collective violence and individual punishment: The criminality of mass atrocity. Northwestern University Law Review 99 (2).
Drumbl, Mark. 2007. Atrocity, punishment and international law. New York: Cambridge University Press.
LaFave, Wayne R., and Austin W. Scott Jr. 1972. Criminal law. St. Paul, MN: West Publishing.
May, Larry. 2005. Crimes against humanity: A normative account. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Prosecutor v. Tadic. 1999. International criminal tribunal for Yugoslavia, case no. IT-94-1-T, Trial Chamber Judgment, May 7.
Schabas, William. 2000. Genocide in international law. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Schabas, William. 2006. The UN international criminal tribunals. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Simester, A.P., and A.T.H. Smith. 1996. Harm and culpability. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Smith, K.J.M. 1991. A modern treatise on the law of criminal complicity. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Vetlesen, Arne Johan. 2007. Genocide: A case for the responsibility of bystanders. In Ethics, nationalism, and just war, ed. Henrik Syse, and Gregory M. Reichberg, 352–371. Washington DC: The Catholic University of America Press.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
May, L. Complicity and the Rwandan Genocide. Res Publica 16, 135–152 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11158-010-9112-4
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11158-010-9112-4