(RNS) The first trial of a Rwandan Roman Catholic priest by the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda began Sept. 20 amid protests of the tribunal itself.

Athanese Seromba, 41, has been accused of directing the murder of 2,000 of his parishioners during the 1994 genocide in the central African country.

Although Seromba's case is the first trial of a Catholic priest at the tribunal, several priests have been convicted by courts in Rwanda. Two of them were later acquitted on appeal.

Seromba has pleaded innocent to the charges of genocide, complicity in genocide, conspiracy to commit genocide and crimes against humanity.

His lawyers planned to argue that although their client was present at the time of the killings in his church in the western parish of Nyange, he was powerless to prevent the murders.

During a 100-day period in 1994, about 800,000 people from Rwanda's Tutsi minority were slaughtered during a campaign organized by the then-Hutu regime.