Senators have said that the National Commission for Human Rights (NCHR) should reform the means of receiving human rights violation related cases by establishing a technology-enabled system to ease the reporting process by the aggrieved.

This follows a drastic drop in the number of cases reported to the rights body, a situation that has been attributed to the Covid-19 outbreak.

During the Plenary Sitting of the Senate held on Wednesday, February 16, senators indicated that the number of residents who physically submit their cases to the Commission plunged during the Covid-19 prevention period because of movement restrictions.

The session was held to deliberate on the Committee on Social Affairs and Human Rights’ assessment of the commission’s annual activity report for the fiscal year 2020-2021.

Statistics from NCHR show that the cases that it dealt with in the last three years continued to be a downward trend. They decreased to 597 in 2020-2021 from 1,328 in the reported year that ended in 2020, implying a drop of 122 per cent. In 2018-2019, there were 1,868 registered cases.

According to the report, the decrease in the cases was due to the fact that the Commission did not deploy some of the means it used to receive citizens’ grievances in public by reaching out to communities in their sectors.

"That issue was caused by Covid-19, because after the pandemic spread to Rwanda (in March 2020), preventive measures against it were set, which prohibited public gatherings. Also, the restrictions imposed on travels between districts impeded some citizens’ access to the Commission’s offices to submit their complaints,” the report reads in part.

The Commission said that it analysed and found human rights infringement in 480 complaints (80.4 percent of the 597 complaints it received in 2020-2021).

They were dominated by the grievances related to rights to property as they accounted for 28.5 percent of the total.

Grievances associated with rights to justice followed with 22.7 percent, and rights to protection from both physical and mental violence (21.7 percent).

Cases of rights to property were dominated by land-related conflicts and a lack of fair compensations to citizens for expropriated property to pave the way for infrastructure projects.

For grievances on rights to justice, the majority of them were about lack of execution of court judgments, while those related to protection from physical and mental violence were dominated by defilement (of girls).

Meanwhile, the Commission indicated that the 480 grievances were taken to the responsible entities for solutions, 415 (86.4 percent) were solved, while 65 (13.54 percent) were not yet addressed.