A France-based rights group has told The New Times that 13 years after it filed a case against a Genocide fugitive who was then living there, Prosecutors now seem set to initiate a trial.

The Collectif des Parties Civiles pour le Rwanda (CPCR), which has for two decades worked to bring Genocide suspects in France to book, filed a case against Eugene Rwamucyo, 60, in 2007.

He is one of the masterminds of the Genocide against the Tutsi in southern Rwanda, in 1994.

He lives in Belgium where he fled after the group pressed for his arrest and trial and the organisation believes French prosecutors will effortlessly get him extradited to France for trial.

Daphrose Mukarumongi, a CPCR co-founder who lives in the city of Reims, told The New Times that according to the information they have, a prosecutor has decided that Rwamucyo be taken to the Cour d’Assises, which handles cases of genocide and war crimes, among others.

"The prosecution has decided that Rwamucyo will be tried at the Cour d’Assises, based on what investigations revealed,” she said.

The decision, Mukarumongi noted, was made on April 17.

"Step two now is that what the prosecutor wrote in what we call le requisitoire will now go through judges who will examine it and then state the charges against Rwamucyo.”

The third step, Mukarumongi explained, is that judges will the send the Indictment Order to the CPCR who are the petitioners so that "we read and approve or appeal.”

Long way to justice

Mukarumongi then explained that if Rwamucyo makes an appeal over that Indictment Order the process is likely to take at least one year and a half.

"If he loses he will still go to the Cour de Cassation and this too will go for another year and a half,” she said.

"Clearly, as you can see, there is a long way before he appears in court.”

Jessica Gerondal Mwiza, deputy chairperson of Ibuka-France, told The New Times that: "The French treatment of the Eugène Rwamucyo case is symptomatic of the way in which the country deals with the history and justice of the Genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda.”

"Like any big cases, like any sensitive and important cases, the mobilization of networks of committed citizens is necessary. It is too weak here. It has been 13 years since this individual was targeted for genocide based on the complaint by the CPCR.”

Mwiza noted that in the early days of the case, Rwamucyo managed to obtain political support in France.

"He didn’t secretly and shamefully defend himself, but did so loudly while pretending to be a political opponent of President Paul Kagame.”

During the Genocide, Rwamucyo was a medical doctor in Butare, current Huye.

He worked at the University Centre for Public Health (CUSP), at the University Teaching hospital and lectured at the then National University of Rwanda.

The former member of the notorious ‘war committee’ that planned and executed Genocide against the Tutsi in Butare is accused of planning the killing of Tutsi students and patients at the hospital.

More than 400 students and staff at the university were killed during the Genocide.

How French justice system favors mass killers

In 2010, Mwiza, who is a French citizen said, France still considered that Rwanda did not have a reliable judicial system and refused his extradition. Worse still, she noted, it released the genocide suspect.

"Now, 10 years pass and the inefficiency of our justice system in France plays in favor of this individual.”

Rwamucyo is being prosecuted by the Pole Genocide et crime contre l’humanité which was set up in January 2012.

The latter is a team of investigating judges established in the Tribunal de Grande Instance (TGI) of Paris to investigate cases of Rwandans implicated in the Genocide.

Today, Mwiza said, "we know that there is a desire to do justice” regarding crimes against humanity and the work of this team of judges in the anti-terrorist prosecutor’s office.

But the problem, she said, lies in the political choices regarding the human and financial resources allocated to it.

"It is too weak, too little and almost too late. In France, most of the genocidaires will die of old age before being judged,” Mwiza said, attributing this to what she called a system.

She stressed that it is high time France considered that the presence of genocidaires on its soil, who directly benefit from the administrative and judicial slowness, from the "lack of means”, is not worthy of the image that the country is trying to give itself.

More about Rwamucyo

Not much is known about how Rwamucyo fled the country after the Genocide in 1994. But the CPCR says he was denied refugee status by the UNHCR in Côte d’Ivoire, in 1995.

Between 2001 and 2007 he worked as a medical specialist in various places and capacities in France.

In May 2008, he got a job as a doctor in a city hospital in Maubeuge, northern France, near the Belgian border but was temporarily dismissed there in October 2009 following the CPCR charges.

In 2002, during a French Senate debate themed "Demain le Rwanda” the suspect bumped into Mukarumongi’s partner, Alain Gauthier, who is president of CPCR, who confronted the latter on the truth about events in Rwanda in 1994.

On September 12, 2002, he was denied refugee status in France.

On April 15, 2007, the CPCR presented it’s charges against him to the public prosecutor’s department in Lille where he worked.

In August 2007, Rwanda indicted him and sent an international arrest warrant to interpol.

On November 8, 2007, the initial CPCR complaint was handed to a court in Paris.

On February 5, 2008, french prosecutors started investigating the case against him.

In September 2009, a gacaca court in Butare where he committed Genocide, sentenced him, in absentia, to life imprisonment.

He was finally expelled from Maubeuge hospital in April 2010.

On May 26, 2010, Rwamucyo was arrested in Sannois, north of Paris, when attending the funeral of Jean Bosco Barayagwiza, another genocidaire who was convicted for Genocide against the Tutsi by the now defunct International Criminal Tribunal of Rwanda (ICTR).

Barayagwiza died in jail.

Rwamucyo was detained in Bois d’Arcy, a Community in north-central France.

On September 15, 2010, the French appeal court in Versailles refused to hand him over to Rwanda and immediately set him free.

On December 21, 2018, investigation into his case started.

On April 17, 2020, a prosecutor issued an indictment that will take him to the Cour d’Assises for trial.

France is home to, among others, Agathe Kanziga, widow of former President Juvenal Habyarimana, Manasse Bigwenzare, a former judge, and Sosthene Munyemana, nicknamed "the butcher of Tumba” for atrocities he was involved in southern Rwanda.

There is also Father Wenceslas Munyeshyaka, a Catholic priest accused of having a direct hand in killings in parts of Kigali.