Genocide suspect Felicien Kabuga to be sent to UN court in Tanzania

PARIS. France’s top civil court has on Wednesday September 30 ruled that Rwandan genocide suspect Felicien Kabuga can be handed over to a United Nations tribunal in Tanzania despite his lawyers' arguments that he is too frail to be extradited.
According to Reuters, UN prosecutors accuse the former tea and coffee tycoon of bankrolling and importing huge numbers of machetes for ethnic Hutu militias who killed hundreds of thousands of Tutsis and moderate Hutus in Rwanda during a 100-day period in 1994
Kabuga's arrest in Paris in May ended a manhunt lasting more than two decades. He has denounced the charges, including genocide and incitement to commit genocide, as "lies".
His lawyers said that at 87 he was too frail to be transferred abroad, especially during a dangerous coronavirus pandemic. The French courts list his age as 84.
Kabuga's legal team also argued that French law violated the constitution by failing to allow for a thorough examination of international arrest warrants.
In a statement, France's Cour de Cassation said it "considers that the investigating chamber was able to consider correctly that there was no legal or medical obstacle to the execution of the arrest warrant transfer order to the United Nations detention centre in Arusha, Tanzania."
France has one month to carry out the ruling, an official in the French judiciary said.
Until his arrest, Kabuga had been the most high-profile fugitive still sought by the U.N. tribunal in Arusha formerly known as the ICTR. The ICTR was closed in 2015, but a successor body still operates in Tanzania and in the Netherlands.
Sources at the tribunal said whether Kabuga was sent first to The Hague or to Arusha would depend in part on the pandemic.