Female Genocide & Pauline Nyiramasuhuko

From BBC News:

Judges at the UN-backed court for Rwanda is to hand down a verdict for the only woman to be charged with genocide before an international court.

Pauline Nyiramasuhuko, 65, was a government minister in 1994 in Rwanda when 800,000 people - mostly from the Tutsi ethnic group - were killed.

Along with four former local officials and her own son, she is accused of organising massacres as well as the rape of women and girls.

She denies all the charges.

Mrs Nyiramasuhuko was Rwanda's minister for family and women's development at the time of the genocide.

The prosecution at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) accuses her of taking part in the government decision to create militias throughout the country. Their mission was to wipe out the Tutsi population as fast as possible.

Mrs Nyiramasuhuko is accused of ordering and assisting in the massacres in her home district of Butare in southern Rwanda. Along with her son, who was in his early 20s at the time, she is also accused of organising the kidnap and rape of Tutsi women and girls.

Rwanda: New Hope For Women

From the Irish Times:

Over the past 16 years, the lives of Rwandan women have been transformed.

Much of this has been out of necessity. After the 1994 genocide, the country was left with a population that was 60 per cent female and 40 per cent male, according to some estimates.

This left the country in a sticky situation, as women did not have the right to inherit land or property. But it prompted women MPs, who held just one in five seats before the genocide to push for change. A bill was passed that gave equal inheritance rights to men and women, which led to the establishment of a 12-member constitutional review commission in 2000.

After being brought around village halls around the country, with input from women and women’s rights groups, the new constitution was passed in 2003. It provided for 30 per cent of seats in parliament to be given to women. In the general election the same year, 55 per cent of seats went to women, the highest proportion in the world.