As Allan A. Ryan, Jr. starts teaching his summer school course “War Crimes, Genocide and Justice,” his ideas on those topics are being implemented half-way across the globe—in Rwanda, where the country is banking on his policy suggestions to deal with the legacy of its 1994 mass genocide.

Ryan has been the director of intellectual property for Harvard Business School Publishing for the last year, after serving for 15 years as University Attorney in Harvard’s Office of the General Counsel.

In 1995, while Ryan was also teaching a course on human rights at Boston College Law School, Rwanda invited him as one of a small group of genocide experts to help with the formidable problem of redressing the wrongs committed during the 100-day long massacre, which claimed 800,000 lives.

When he traveled to Rwanda, Ryan was deeply shaken to learn that there was “still evidence of [genocide] everywhere.”

He vividly recalled a town enveloped by a stench “you could almost taste” from the odor of bodies still being buried in a mass grave.

“On one side, there were the torsos, and on the other were the skulls,” Ryan said. “It was too difficult to match them up, so the survivors had to just bury them all together.”

No Rwandan family went unaffected in the genocide that pitted the majority Hutu population against the Tutsis, with nearly 115,000 Rwandans suspected of having taken part in the machete-wielding frenzy.

The large scope of the Rwandan genocide made the possibility of criminal prosecution for war crimes beyond possibility.

“My first thought was, ‘This country is too small, too poor to try all these people,’” Ryan said. “It would be a staggering job in [the United States], and it’s out of the question in Rwanda.”

His pessimism proved well-founded. Since trials began in 1996, they have moved at the pace of about 1,000 per year—at which rate most of the suspects will die in prison before ever facing prosecution.

Ryan realized that “an alternative to trials—not an alternative to justice” was what was needed.

“You don’t need a trial to get justice,” he said.

And earlier this month, in accordance with much of the advice outlined in a memo written by Ryan in 1995, Rwanda did away with the orthodox trial system. In its place, it has reinstituted the gacaca ( pronounced ga-CHA-cha), an ancient tribal custom—literally “justice on the grass” in Kinyarwandan, Rwanda’s most spoken language.

When Ryan first heard of gacaca from a Rwandan member of his committee, he quickly grasped that though it had “nothing to do with the law,” it had “everything to do with justice.”

For Ryan, the gacaca system represents a completely different approach to justice than the Western method, but one that better fits the situation.

“It’s not oriented towards defining guilt or innocence; it’s about finding a solution,” he said.

Ryan says that the system will work by giving those who participated in the genocide the opportunity to admit their actions.

“It’s only going to work if people are truthful,” he said. Suspects will have to “come to the lead and say, ‘Yes, I took part. But I was young, I was scared, I was under the influence of a teacher.’ Those who insist on their innocence will have to wait for a trial.”

Many are in favor of the gacaca system, hoping it will deliver more lenient sentences. Judges may hand down a maximum sentence of life in prison, but may not issue the death penalty.

At the gacaca hearings, suspects have no lawyer, and the judges—ordinary citizens elected by the community—will have received scant legal training. These shortcomings created considerable controversy, which delayed their implementation until now, eight years after the massacres.

But Ryan believes that the promotion to attorney general of Gerald Gahima, his co-author for the memo, is what definitively led to its transformation into law.

Gahima was from the start opposed to the other major proposed solution—importing judges and lawyers from abroad.

“He said, ‘We’re not going to rent justice,’” Ryan said.

However otherwise flawed, the gacaca system is completely indigenous. It also has the advantage of great speed—all of the trials may only take five years, by optimistic estimates.

The process will apply only to civilians who partook in the terror. The masterminds will be tried in a U.N.-sponsored International Criminal Tribunal in neighboring Tanzania.

Ryan acknowledges that the solution is not perfect—but says no attempt to punish war crimes can be.

“There is never a situation in which you can put every war criminal in jail,” he said.

Ryan had extensive background in the war crimes field: From 1980 to 1983 he was the Director of the Office of Special Investigation for the U.S. Department of Justice, serving as the chief Nazi war crimes prosecutor for the United States—the first person to hold the position.

His scholarship has focused on understanding what is at the origin of all mass slaughters.

“The Holocaust, Cambodia and Rwanda have all caused us to rethink the laws of war,” Ryan said. “My whole course is about trying to get beyond their very obvious dissimilarities.”

In this way, he hopes the gacaca solution will have resonance with other war-ravaged countries.

“The point is to look at other definitions of justice,” Ryan said. “This is one of those ways. Would this work with al-Quaeda terrorists? No—But it may teach us something that will apply in East Timor or Chechnya.”

This summer, his students may feel more encouraged to hope that their study of the laws of war can make a difference.

“Every year, I pass out that memo, as what I would suggest for Rwanda,” Ryan said. “Now I can say, that’s what they are actually doing.”

—Staff writer Eugenia B. Schraa can be reached at schraa@fas.harvard.edu.