The Rwanda Human Rights Commissioner, Laurent Nkongoli, yesterday criticised the international community for looking on while the former Rwandan government of the late President Juvenal Habyarimana, was violating the Universal Declaration on the Fight Against Genocide.

Nkongoli was addressing a press conference which was held at the Supreme Court room in commemoration, of the 60th Anniversary since the Universal of Human Rights and the Genocide Convention was adopted.

"The Rwandan government signed the declaration in 1975 and it clearly showed that article number nine of the declaration did not concern it. This shows that the government in power at that time had plans of executing the genocide in the future” said Nkongoli.

Article nine of the Convention on Genocide stipulates that Disputes between the Contracting Parties relating to the interpretation, application or fulfillment of the present Convention, including those relating to the responsibility of a State for genocide or any of the other acts enumerated in Article 3, shall be submitted to the International Court of Justice at the request of any of the parties to the dispute.

It is at this point that Nkongoli lashed at the International Community and United Nations for not paying heed to the massacre of more than a million people in the 1994 Tutsi Genocide.

Commissioner Nkongoli was also irked by the refusal of the UN to transfer genocide cases to Rwanda and yet the country had fulfilled all the necessary requirements and obligations.

Adding to this, they violate article number six which stipulates that "persons charged with genocide shall be tried by a competent tribunal of the State in the territory in which the act was committed or by such international penal tribunal as may have jurisdiction with respect to the Contracting Parties. The crime of genocide is a justifiable offence under the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (17 July 1998, not yet in force).”

Responding to a question from the press about those who are in denial over the genocide, commissioner Nkongoli said that according to article number four of the declaration, it stipulates that anyone who denies the genocide would be imprisoned ten to twenty years. He added that however, many people have been and are still denying the genocide.

Since the genocide was declared by the UN to have occurred in Rwanda, some people have come up with all sorts of excuses of denying it ever happened claiming instead that  there was a double genocide, giving the killings legitimacy by claiming that they were sparked off by the crashing of Habyarimana’s plane.

"Those people who legitimise and give definitions to what may have caused the genocide are totally wrong and they deserve to be punished by the fourth article because nothing can ever spark the genocide whatsoever,” said Pauline Mukankusi who had represented the minister of Justice at the press conference.

Mukankusi also urged that all people should start asking themselves what role they have played in the fight against Genocide.

The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide was adopted on 9th December 1948

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