A US lawyer helping defend a Rwandan presidential hopeful against charges that include promoting a genocidal ideology was arrested on Friday and charged with genocide denial, police said.
The US National Lawyers Guild demanded Peter Erlinder’s immediate release and said the government was trying to hamstring the legal defense of Victoire Ingabire, an opposition leader running against Rwandan President Paul Kagame in Aug. 9 elections.
Kagame has been lauded abroad for social and economic reforms and is expected to win another seven-year term, but human rights groups say his administration has an ironclad hold on power and quashes opposing views.
“There can be no justice for anyone if the state can silence lawyers for defendants whom it dislikes and a government that seeks to prevent lawyers from being vigorous advocates for their clients cannot be trusted,” said David Gespass, the president of the US National Lawyers Guild.
Rwanda’s 1994 genocide claimed the lives of more than 500,000 people, mostly Tutsis and moderate Hutus. The massacres ended when mostly Tutsi rebels led by Kagame defeated the mostly Hutu extremist perpetrators.
Ingabire, a Hutu, returned to Rwanda in January to contest elections after 16 years of living abroad. She says she returned to Rwanda because the country needs an open discussion to promote reconciliation.
She immediately visited a memorial to Tutsis killed in the 1994 genocide and asked why Hutus who also died weren’t remembered. She was arrested and freed on bail, but her passport was seized and she cannot leave Kigali. If convicted, Ingabire, 41, could be sentenced to more than two decades in prison.
Her case has become a test of where Rwanda stands in its effort to move past the genocide — and how much freedom the government will allow.
Erlinder is the president of an association of defense lawyers at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda that is trying the masterminds of the 1994 genocide. He is also a law professor at William Mitchell College of Law in St Paul, Minnesota.
He came to Rwanda four days ago and “has been publicly saying that there was no genocide in Rwanda,” police spokesman Eric Kayiranga said.
“It has nothing to do with diplomacy, it is totally a criminal case,” Kayiranga said when asked whether the arrest could cause a diplomatic spat with the US.
US Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota said her office is working with the US embassy in Rwanda to make sure that Erlinder “is treated well and that the legal process works quickly and fairly so he can come home.”
Klobuchar said on Friday she has spoken to US Ambassador to Rwanda Stuart Symington, a longtime friend, and he told her that embassy officials met with Erlinder soon after his arrest and reported that he is in good health.
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