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The case in question concerns one amongst a comparably small handful of individuals who are accused of having actively endorsed a politcy of genocide as a way to relieve the nation of its ethnic conflict. The Kambanda case would officially begin only three years after the commitment of his crimes. According to a timeline on the trial, "Jean Kambanda is arrested in Nairobi, Kenya on 18th July 1997 and transferred to Arusha, to the International Penal Court for Rwanda on the same day." Thus would begin a remarkable trial, somewhat unprecedented, but arguably driven by the conditions which would be established by the events of World War II. Kambanda's trial is contextualized by the recent and more distant elements of Rwanda's ethnic and political history.

The notorious ethnic cleansing of Rwanda which occurred in the early 1990's had actually been the long-standing product of decolonization. When the political power vacuum had left the nation to the disposal of leadership by force, Rwanda's 1959 revolution for independence did not just separate it from the authority of its German oppressors. It additionally exiled countless numbers from its own population which the emergent leadership viewed as sympathizers to colonialism. This is a recurrence of an important theme in Africa's structural problems as characterized in the earlier breakdown of its continental factioning. With his power threatened in 1990 by the invasion of refugees from neighboring Uganda and their implied subversion of his rule through majority, despotic President Juvenal Habyarimana orchestrated a military propaganda initiative "to redefine the population of Rwanda into "Rwandans," meaning those who backed the president, and the "ibyitso" or "accomplices of the enemy," meaning the Tutsi minority and Hutu opposed to him."

Hearkening to ethnic tensions which had initially predisposed the Hutu to hatred for and fear of the Tutsi, Kambanda in the wake of Habyarimana's assassination continued the devastating exploitation of foreign incursion. The casualties, which numbered over a million, of Tutsi if including political enemies of the president, became just another in the litany of tragedies which are the lasting effect of colonialism. And more than that, it was a demonstration of the shortcoming in resources and liberties availed to international governing bodies whose powers appear to be stunted by poor collective judgment. The purpose of its implied powers to allow the U.N. To take immediate peacekeeping action when necessary is explicated by he legal charter, which states, "let the end be legitimate, let it be within the scope of the constitution, and all means which are appropriate, which are planly adapted to that end, which are not prohibited, but consist with the letter and spirit of the constitution, are constitutional. Essentially the same arguments pro and con