The Higher Audiovisual Council (CSA), the regulators of television content in France, has criticised French TV Canal+ over its broadcast of a comedy seen as ridiculing the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi.

Meeting at a plenary session, members of the CSA examined the comedy and concluded that some elements of its content undermine human dignity and are indeed detrimental to those affected by the Genocide.

"The Council considered that certain statements made in this sequence infringe on human dignity despite the humorous motive and nature of the sketch,” CSA said in a statement released on its web site on Wednesday.

The Council regrets that a character in the sketch went as far as undermining the Genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda by saying that "there is still a packet in full form” after performing a story about efforts to adopt a Rwandan child and apparently failing to get reassurances that the child’s entire family or everyone in the adoptee’s village was killed.

The actor goes as far as asking to see the map of the adoptee’s razed village and mockingly says it is to ensure that "everyone was still there,” apparently in order to drop the idea of adopting the child, and complaining that talk of Genocide didn’t make sense.

A second man in the comedy performed a song falsely presented as of Rwandan tradition, but inspired by a French nursery rhyme commonly known as Fais dodo Colas mon petit frère (go to sleep, Colas, my little brother) and sung words like "mom is upstairs, cut into pieces; daddy is downstairs, he lacks an arm.”

CSA describes the words in the song as unacceptable because they make explicit reference to disrespecting bodies of Genocide victims and amputated bodies of survivors.

The Council sent a notice to Canal+ as a warning that the television station has violated its legal obligations and showed disrespect for Genocide victims, including children and adolescents.

Plans to sue Canal+ still on

Meanwhile, anti-Genocide activists in France who last week announced they would sue Canal+ to compel it to publicly recognise mistakes in the broadcast, are not about to relent.

The plan to sue the television channel  was announced by French citizen Pierre Jean Le Goffic, the initiator of an online citizen petition that has been signed by more than 22,000 people to seek apology from Canal+ over the comedy.

"CSA endorsed our position and qualifies, as we have argued since the beginning of our efforts, that the words (in the comedy) undermine human dignity and are detrimental to those affected by the Genocide. We must maintain our efforts so that Canal+ acknowledges its faults. Our lawyer, Richard Gisagara, will take legal action in this direction next week,” Le Goffic said in an e-mail sent to other activists.

The activists, especially those from the Rwandan community in France and their friends, have also protested on the streets in Paris to deliver a message of their disapproval.

Gisagara, a French-Rwandan lawyer living in France, told this paper last week that the petitioners would prove in court that their dignity or that of their parents or children was undermined by the comedy.