Laity Kama; President of Genocide Tribunal

Laity Kama, the first president of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, has died. He was 62.

Kama, a judge from Senegal, died Sunday at Aga Khan Hospital in Nairobi, where he was undergoing treatment for heart problems, U.N. officials said Monday.

The U.N. flag in Arusha, Tanzania, was lowered to half-staff Monday at the court--charged by the U.N. Security Council with prosecuting those responsible for the 1994 Rwandan genocide in which more than 500,000 people died.

Kama was born in Dakar, Senegal, in 1939, and began his career as a magistrate in 1969. For 15 years he was assistant public prosecutor at the Court of Appeal in Dakar and in 1992 was appointed first assistant public prosecutor at the Supreme Court of Appeal.

As an expert, he represented Africa in the working group on arbitrary detention established by the U.N. Commission on Human Rights.

He was a member of the Senegalese delegation to the U.N. Commission on Human Rights in Geneva from 1983 to 1990 and a member of the advisory board to the International Human Rights Education and Monitoring Training Program at Hamline University in St. Paul, Minn., since 1999.

Kama presided over the trial of Jean Paul Akayesu, the first to be found guilty by the tribunal of genocide. He also presided over the guilty plea to genocide by former Rwanda Prime Minister Jean Kambanda.

The current president of the tribunal, Navanathem Pillay, said she had visited Kama, who appeared to be recovering, but that his condition worsened Saturday night.

“He was a great man of quality,” said Pillay.

Kama served four years as the tribunal’s president and continued to conduct trials until he fell ill in April.