Determinants of case outcomes in Rwanda’s postgenocide gacaca courts

Abstract

Transitional justice trials have become a central mechanism for addressing mass violence and human rights violations, yet little is known about the determinants of case outcomes within these courts—particularly in domestic contexts. This study examines Rwanda’s gacaca courts, a localized transitional justice system that tried people suspected of participating in the 1994 genocide. Drawing on a comprehensive dataset of all gacaca trials, we analyze how individual-level factors (e.g., gender, age, foreign-born status) and community-level characteristics (e.g., cumulative participants, urbanicity) influenced guilty verdicts and sentence lengths. Our findings suggest that, beyond offense category and charge counts (and, in sentencing models, net of a proxy for confession), demographic and contextual factors significantly shaped trial outcomes. Specifically, in the absence of racial differences among defendants, we find that age and gender were significantly tied to guilty verdicts and sentence lengths. Additionally, defendants tried in districts with higher cumulative participants were less likely to be found guilty and received shorter sentences, consistent with desensitization and system-burden mechanisms. These insights contribute to understanding the lived impacts of transitional justice in Rwanda and offer broader implications for the design and evaluation of domestic postconflict legal systems.