Human Rights Watch (HRW) claims to be fighting for the rights of Rwandans. But Rwandans are pressuring their government to arrest genocide deniers, mainly operating on YouTube, and Human Rights Watch is siding with the latter and against what Rwandans want. But as American diplomat Richard Johnson pointed out (PDF), when it comes to Rwanda, HRW has always sided with criminals.
On October 19, Human Rights Watch published an article titled "Rwanda: Crackdown on Opposition, Media Intensifies.” It’s an article that doesn’t even feign dishonesty so much so that, after reading, one understands why some governments would decide to simply bribe the organization off instead of having to time and again read about all manner of distortions from an entity that claims to stand for something as important as human rights.
The article refers to Ingabire as a "party leader” and Dalfa Umurinzi as a "political party.” Of course, the claim that Ingabire, a convicted criminal, created a political party fails to mention two important facts. One, a convicted criminal cannot by law register a political party or offer oneself in its leadership. Two, for reasons that should be obvious to anyone who follows closely, Ingabire created the so-called Dalfa in November 2019 in the aftermath of the October 2019 terror attack in Musanze District in October 2019 by RUD-Urunana terror outfit that left 14 people killed and others injured. RUD-Urunana and Victoire Ingabire’s own terror outfit, FDU-Inkingi, were pinned by the United Nations Report on the Congo of December 2018 as members of the P5 coalition based in DRC. With suspects in the attack – who had been captured following an RDF chase – set to appear in court, Ingabire feared for the worst and began to seek for ways to disassociate herself from the P5 terror coalition. The trial for 38 captured terrorists is ongoing.
At any rate, neither of these (RUD-Uranana, FDU-Inkingi, Dalfa-Umurinzi, and all the other outfits that Ingabire has laundered herself with) has ever been a "political party” in Rwanda as the corrupt Human Rights Watch states in its article.
As the American diplomat Richard Johnson helped to reveal in The Travesty of Human Right Watch on Rwanda, "This blatantly arbitrary and politically motivated” rhetoric of Human Rights Watch "is intended to further discourage” the Rwandan government from enforcing its laws on genocide denial. This is the alliance between HRW and Ingabire.
Rwanda’s rule of law
In the article, Human Rights Watch goes to great lengths to prove the World Justice Report 2021 Rule of Law Index that ranked Rwanda first in Africa and 42nd out of 139 countries globally.
"Nsengimana was held in pretrial detention of fraud but released … for lack of evidence,” Human Rights Watch writes, before adding that two other suspects, Niyonsenga and Komezusenge "both were acquitted… prosecution appealed the acquittal.”
Unless Human Rights Watch wants to be the organ delivering verdicts for the accused, its own coverage of the conduct of the courts seems to suggest that verdicts are independently arrived at, even to the extent that they commonly frustrate prosecution authorities into appealing the cases they lost. In other words, the courts should be left alone to do their work without undue political interference from anyone, including Human Rights Watch.
Accordingly, HRW should leave the assessment as to whether these people, who have been arrested for not adhering to genocide denial laws on their YouTube channels, are "doing important public interest reporting” to the courts to determine, especially given its record of impartiality as Human Rights Watch itself acknowledges when it writes about consistency of acquittals "for lack of evidence” on the part of the prosecution.
So, we know, thanks to HRW, what will happen to the YouTube suspects if prosecution fails to present the requisite evidence.