Rwanda detention abuses make jail ‘place of fear’: rights group

NAIROBI: Rwandan authorities are perpetrating serious human rights abuses in detention facilities, including torturing inmates, Human Rights Watch said on Tuesday, denouncing a lack of accountability for those responsible.

Under President Paul Kagame´s three-decade rule, political dissent and free speech have been crushed, with international campaigners long decrying the shrinking civil rights space in the small east African country.

HRW´s report is based on interviews between 2019 and 2024 with almost 30 people, including former inmates, as well as court documents and interviews shared online.

It described how “serious human rights abuses, including torture, are pervasive in many of Rwanda´s detention facilities”, saying it believed only one senior prison official, Innocent Kayumba, had been held accountable.

HRW said it had contacted the government in September over the report´s findings, and had not received a response by the time of publication.

However, reacting to the report late on Tuesday, government spokesperson Yolande Makolo said HRW did not have “a monopoly on human rights, and has proven time and again not to be a serious or credible source of reporting”.

Interviews with former detainees at Kwa Gacinya, which HRW said was an “unofficial detention facility” under the control of police in the capital Kigali, revealed a “pattern of ill-treatment, mock executions, beatings, and torture that dates back to at least 2011”.

“It was a place of fear,” opposition member Venant Abayisenga, who was held there in 2017, said in a 2020 interview.