The International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) has appointed Judge Khalida Rashid Khan as the court’s next president, announced on May 25.

The 61 year-old Pakistani assumed her new post on May 27, replacing Dennis Byron.

The ICTR was established by a UN Security Council resolution in November 1994 to investigate and try the individuals suspected of being the main architects of the 1994 genocide against ethnic Tutsis and moderate Hutus.

Khan, who joined the court in August 2003 and has served as Vice President since May 2007, is the second woman appointed to the President’s chair.

South African Navi Pillay, now the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, was the first.

The court said it would deliver a verdict on June 24 in its longest running case involving six people accused of inciting the rape of Tutsi women during the genocide.

The case, opened in April 2001.

Khan’s career started as a civil judge in 1974 in Peshawar, Pakistan. In 1978, she was promoted as senior civil judge in Peshawar.

From 1981 to 1982 she worked as special judge in the anti-corruption in Peshawar and Hazara Division. She was later appointed Deputy Secretary in the Law Department of the Government of North-West Frontier Province of Pakistan.

In 1994, Judge Rashid Khan was promoted Judge at the High Court of Peshawar, becoming the first Pakistani woman ever appointed to that position.

She was also the first woman in Pakistan to be appointed as District and Sessions Judge.