Prior to the establishment of a permanent international criminal court, in November 1994, the UN created the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) whose mandate was to prosecute those responsible for the genocide and other serious violations of international humanitarian law. Since its inception, the ICTR has indicted ninety-two persons and managed to arrest seventy-eight of them. By May 2009, forty-four cases had been completed and twenty-four were ongoing (The African Union Series. 2013). Zimbabwe is not a party to the Rome Statute of ICC, and therefore the chances of international prosecutions of perpetrators of gross human rights violations before the ICC are slim unless the United Nations Security Council makes referrals to the Court. This is also highly unlikely given the possibility of veto power by States in the Security Council such as Russia and China. 4.6.6 Vetting Vetting refers to „examining personnel backgrounds during restructuring or recruitment to eliminate from public service or otherwise sanction abusive and corrupt officials.‟ (ICTJ 2014). It belongs to the group of institutional reforms explained below: “Institutional reform is the process of reviewing and restructuring state institutions so that they respect human rights, preserve the rule of law, and are accountable to their constituents. By incorporating a transitional justice element, reform efforts can both provide accountability for individual perpetrators and disable the structures that allowed abuses to occur.” (ICTJ) As was seen earlier (Section 4.1 to 4.4), vetting is more commonly applied, than some other mechanisms, and more frequently during post-transition. There is some variation between regime types, with vetting more common in countries transitioning from civilian rather than military regimes, but also, paradoxically, more common in individualized as opposed to collectively-governed authoritarian regimes. This paradox deserves more research. Conventional wisdom argues vetting is antecedent to a political transition, such as a regime change, or a paradigm shift in political setup from civil strife to liberal democracy, or end of conflict under authoritarian rule, as the case maybe. However, as with other institutional reform mechanisms in post-transition periods, such as structural reforms, transformation of legal systems, creation of oversight bodies, demobilization, disarmament and reintegration and education programs, vetting is possible in pre-transitional states and early transitional stages. It is difficult to describe the role of vetting in pre-transitional states. Mainstream literature and notes from practitioner‟s analyses of the possible aims and justification for vetting are largely in isolation from other transitional justice measures, such as criminal prosecutions, truth telling, reparations for victims, and other forms of institutional reform. In trying to situate vetting in a transitional context, it is important to start with some caveats. First, there have been plenty of transitions in which no formal vetting procedures, not even of rule of law institutions, have been established (for example, most of the countries studied in the previous chapter). Many countries have employed very modest and sector-specific vetting for example, in South Africa vetting was only limited to the security sector. Thus, it is important to note that „we should not overstate the importance of vetting in transitions.‟ (De Greiff, 2008 527) 32