Torture in Rwanda’s prisons – DW – October 15, 2024

According to Human Rights Watch (HRW), former prisoners from Rwanda report beatings, fake drowning, starvation. In many prisons in the East African country, “serious human rights violations, including torture, are ubiquitous,” the New York-based human rights organization said in a report that has now been published.

According to HRW, the practices described by the ex-prisoners are used in both official prisons and unofficial detention centers. Rwanda’s government also failed to investigate the allegations.

HRW contacted the government in the capital Kigali in September about the report’s findings, the organization said. However, at the time of publication this Tuesday, she had not yet received a response.

Conditions in Kwa Gacinya “particularly brutal”

The report is based on court documents and around 30 interviews with those affected from 2019 to 2024. They were held in three prisons. The crackdown in Kwa Gacinya in the capital Kigali is said to be particularly brutal. According to HRW, this is an “unofficial prison camp” controlled by the police.

Ex-detainees would testify to a “system of abuse, torture, beatings and torture” in Kwa Gacinya – conditions dating back to at least 2011. This included months-long stays in “coffin-like” cells and confessions extracted under torture, according to court documents.

“It was a place of fear,” said opposition figure Venant Abayisenga, describing the conditions there years ago. During his imprisonment in Kwa Gacinya in 2017, he heard, among other things, how people were being executed, says Abayisenga in an interview published on the online channel YouTube in 2020. A few months after his public statements about prison conditions, the opposition activist disappeared without a trace. HRW also collected similar statements from prisoners from other prisons in the country.

Perpetrators apparently mostly remain unmolested

The government in Kigali has “failed to investigate or address repeated and credible allegations of torture by detainees or former detainees since at least 2017,” HRW stressed. Investigations by international organizations are “regularly” blocked. An HRW employee was refused entry in May.

Apart from one high-ranking official, no one appears to have been held responsible so far. The organization criticized that there was more or less impunity towards the perpetrators. A verdict from the beginning of April shows that it is also possible to break the deeply rooted practice of torture in Rwanda. In the proceedings, among other things, a prison director was sentenced to 15 years in prison and a fine for the murder of a prisoner.

Rwanda has been governed by President Paul Kagame in an increasingly authoritarian manner since 2000. The 66-year-old has been criticized internationally for deficits in democracy and the rule of law.

Even before Human Rights Watch’s current publication, there had long been allegations that political opponents were becoming systematically persecuted in the East African country and, according to reports from human rights organizations, sometimes forced to make false confessions through torture. Others disappear or die in supposed “accidents”. According to recent statistics from the Institute for Crime and Justice Policy Research at Birkbeck University in London, Rwanda has one of the highest incarceration rates in the world, with 637 prisoners per 100,000 people.

AR/Page (epd, afp)