Fully Authoritarian
World’s Population
Population
HRF classifies Rwanda as ruled by a fully authoritarian regime.
Rwanda is a semi-presidential system. The Head of State, Paul Kagame, seized de facto power in July 1994 as the military commander of the rebel Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), which prevailed in a civil war capped by the worst genocide since World War II. The mayhem was the last turn in over three decades of bloody power struggles between and within the country’s two main communities: the minority Tutsi and the majority Hutu. Since then, Kagame and the RPF have consolidated absolute power and captured the state through systematic repression of dissent, closing of civil and political space, constitutional manipulation, and the staging of sham elections.
National elections are a sham, to the point where the real, mainstream political opposition does not have a realistic chance to meaningfully compete and possibly win. Since 2003, the ruling Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) has staged unfree, unfair, and uncompetitive national elections in which it has claimed implausible, astronomically high vote shares after completely skewing the electoral playing field in its favor through the systematic jailing or barring of main opposition challengers and obstruction of main opposition campaigning. With absolute control of state institutions and resources and no checks to the regime’s power, the incumbent’s advantage is insurmountable.
Independent media, political leaders, civil society leaders, organizations, and regular people face overt and systematic retaliation if they openly criticize or challenge the regime. Independent journalists reporting on public corruption and human rights abuses have suffered physical and online intimidation, imprisonment, enforced disappearances, or suspicious deaths. Political dissidents and other critics of the regime have suffered the same fates, with the regime waging an exceptionally broad and deadly transnational repression against them.
Institutions largely fail to serve as independent checks on the regime. Rwanda is a patrimonial regime with power concentrated around Kagame and his cronies, and state institutions across all branches of government are completely captured by the RPF. In this context, legislative, judicial, and key oversight bodies do not serve as a check to executive power.
National elections are a sham, to the point where the real, mainstream political opposition does not have a realistic chance to meaningfully compete and possibly win. Since Rwanda’s first-ever multi-party elections in 2003, the regime has staged unfree, unfair, and uncompetitive polls in which it systematically claims victory with implausible, astronomical vote shares. Elections occur in the context of significant restrictions on opposition figures, intimidation, a lack of genuine competition, and an overall highly controlled environment.
The regime has systematically and unfairly barred real, mainstream opposition parties or candidates from competing in elections. The RPF regime has negated the opposition’s chances to meaningfully compete by denying main opposition figures access to the ballot and legal registration of their parties. For example, the regime-controlled National Electoral Commission (NEC) has systematically and unfairly denied legal registration to the parties of Kagame’s two most serious political opponents: The People Salvation Movement of Diana Rwigara and the DALFA-Umurinzi of Victoire Ingabire. NEC arbitrarily disqualified Ingabire, Rwigara, and Bernard Ntaganda of the registered Social Party Imberakuri from running in the 2024 election.
The RPF regime has systematically, unfairly, and significantly hindered real, mainstream opposition parties’ or candidates’ electoral campaigns. It has followed a pattern of harassing, intimidating, and imprisoning the most serious opposition presidential candidates on trumped-up charges after they announce their candidacy. Examples include Pasteur Bizimungu ahead of the 2003 election, Victoire Ingabire and Bernard Ntaganda ahead of the 2010 elections, and Diane Rwigara ahead of the 2017 elections. In addition, members, aides, and supporters of the main political opponents have suffered regime-enabled intimidation and suspicious enforced disappearances and deaths ahead of elections. For example, a month before the 2010 elections, Andrei Kagwa Rwisereka, Vice-President of the opposition Democratic Green Party, which was barred from the ballot, went missing before his decapitated body was later found. In May 2017, five months before the general elections, Jean Damascene Habarugira, a local representative of Ingabire’s unregistered party, went missing after being called to meet a local security official. His dead body later turned up in a hospital. During the same 2017 campaign, Diane Rwigara and opposition politician Philippe Mpayimana both reported harassment and intimidation of their representatives while they sought to collect the signatures needed in support of their nomination.
The regime has systematically enjoyed significant and unfair campaign advantages.
These unfair campaign advantages derive from the RPF’s total capture of the state machinery, extending to loyal decentralized administration (presidentially-appointed district governors) and its cells of political enforcers present in every community in the country. For example, during the 2024 election campaign, local authorities ordered community and business leaders to collect contributions to the RPF from residents and their staff for the RPF campaign, ordered businesses to shut down and adorn streets with RPF colors, and aided party enforcers in pushing their constituents to attend RPF rallies. The main opposition candidate allowed on the ballot, Frank Habineza of the DGPR, reported that in one instance, authorities in a district fined a shop that sold energy drinks to his campaign staff.
State assets are also leveraged to skew political competition in favor of the ruling RPF, and advertising revenue is allocated more heavily toward pro-government reporting. Election coverage is often dominated by government-controlled outlets and provides favorable exposure to the ruling RPF while restricting coverage of opposition parties. This points to another pattern of state resources being used disproportionately in favor of the ruling RPF party, specifically during campaign seasons.
Independent electoral oversight has been systematically and seriously undermined. The National Electoral Commission (NEC), which has oversight authority over the voters registry, approval of candidacies, access to public media organs during electoral campaigns, and resolution of electoral disputes, has been under heavy influence or control of the regime since its inception in 2005. This is due to the concentration of powers of nomination and appointment of its commissioners in the Presidency, the cabinet, and the Senate, which are all RPF-controlled. The Presidency controls the compensation of NEC commissioners.
The regime has skewed the electoral playing field so much so that it generally claims victory with a very high vote share. In each election since 2003, the regime-controlled NEC has coronated Kagame with over 90% of the vote, and credited the RPF-led coalition with majorities among elected parliamentary seats in legislative polls – margins so extreme that they suggest a lack of authentic competition. The July 2024 elections continued this pattern with Kagame claiming over 99% of the vote and a voter turnout of 98.2%. Main opposition candidate Frank Habineza (DGPR) was credited with only 0.5% of the vote share, and Philippe Mpayimana (independent) only 0.32%.
Independent media, political leaders, civil society leaders, organizations, and regular people face overt and systematic retaliation if they openly criticize or challenge the regime. The RPF and non-state actors aligned with the RPF heavily manipulate information. Journalists, dissidents, critics, and political opponents have been victims of physical, digital, and transnational harassment, threats, arbitrary arrests, imprisonment, torture, enforced disappearances, and suspicious deaths.
The regime has systematically and heavily manipulated media coverage in its favor. The regime’s relentless decimation of the country’s once vibrant independent newspapers, a severely restricted civic space, and the imprisonment, death, or flight into exile of many independent journalists and human rights defenders have allowed the regime to dominate and fill the national and digital information space with propaganda flattering Kagame and demonizing dissenters. The regime and its affiliates control national public media such as the Rwanda Broadcasting Agency, but also the dominant private news outlets such as Rushyasha and The New Times.
Non-state actors with ties to the regime have systematically contributed to heavily manipulating media coverage. A digital army of social media accounts aligned with the regime systematically amplifies RPF propaganda and disinformation campaigns. For example, in 2024, a Clemson University Media Forensics Hub study identified a large AI-powered coordinated RPF-aligned influence campaign on X involving 464 accounts and over 650,000 messages pushing pro-Kagame narratives and talking points online.
Non-state actors with ties to the regime have systematically contributed to seriously intimidating independent, dissenting media, political leaders, civil society leaders, organizations, or members of the general public. A digital army of social media accounts aligned with the RPF systematically conducts coordinated campaigns attacking critics and opponents of the regime. For example, the Clemson study found that the coordinated RPF-aligned influence campaign on X generated thousands of posts to partially demonize critics of the regime. Social media accounts affiliated with the RPF systematically carry out coordinated smear campaigns against critics and opponents.
Over the course of Kagame’s rule, the regime has relentlessly decimated the independent press with threats, intimidation, lawfare, and imprisonment, forcing critical outlets to close or self-censor or journalists to flee into exile. As the remaining independent journalists moved to online news channels, the regime cracked down on them. In 2021, Dieudonné Niyonsenga, who reported on human rights on his YouTube news channel Ishema TV, was sentenced to seven years in prison on trumped-up charges of forging press cards, impersonating a journalist, and “obstructing the implementation of government-ordered works and humiliating the leadership of the country and public service officers and those in charge of security.” Another journalist, Théoneste Nsengimana Umubavu TV, has been in prison since October 2021 for planning to cover an event organized by DALFA-Umurinzi members.
Several critical journalists have also been murdered in suspicious circumstances. Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) has documented nine journalists murdered or missing since 1996. The most recent case is the suspicious 2023 death in what the police claimed was a traffic accident of leading independent journalist John Williams Ntwali. Prior to his death, Ntwali had been arbitrarily imprisoned and persecuted for his work investigating corruption, injustices, and human rights abuses, including torture of political prisoners. He had reported several regime assassination attempts, which he claimed were staged as accidents.
The regime has systematically, seriously, and unfairly censored dissenting speech. The regime abuses vague speech laws criminalizing incitement, the spreading of “false information,” or the “publication of rumors,” and the vague offenses of “genocide ideology” and genocide denial to stifle legitimate discussion, testimonies, accounts, and stories contradicting the official regime-sanctioned narrative of the 1994 genocide and reconciliation. The regime has abused these laws to jail several critics. They include Aimable Karasira, a former university lecturer, political commentator, and Tutsi genocide survivorimprisoned since 2021 on trumped-up charges of denying and justifying the genocide for discussing the RPF post-genocide mass atrocities, a state taboo in Rwanda. Yvonne Idamanage, an online commentator who discussed poverty, the regime’s mistreatment of genocide survivors, and political exploitation of genocide memorials, was sentenced to 15 years in jail on trumped-up charges of “inciting violence.” In 2014, the regime sentenced popular singer Kizito Mihigo, also a Tutsi genocide survivor, to ten years in prison on trumped-up anti-state charges for releasing a song criticizing the state policy of recognizing Tutsi as the only victims of the Rwanda story.
The RPF has systematically killed or forcibly disappeared dissidents or attempted to commit these crimes. In 1996, Paul Rusesabagina fled Rwanda after escaping an assassination attempt at the hands of an RPF soldier. In 2019, Kagame publicly admitted to the regime’s assassination of former Interior Minister and former senior RPF figure Seth Sendashonga in Nairobi in 1998. Sendashonga became a target after denouncing the regime’s post-genocide massacres of tens of thousands of mostly Hutu civilians. The same year, South Africa’s National Prosecution Authority issued arrest warrants for two Rwandans accused of murdering regime opponent Patrick Karegeya, a RPF co-founder and Rwanda’s former spy chief, who was strangled in his hotel room in Johannesburg on January 1, 2014. South African authorities held the Rwandan regime responsible for the murder. Furthermore, an atmosphere of intimidation has been exacerbated by a pattern of enforced disappearances of regime critics in total impunity. An example is the case of prominent poet and genocide survivor Innocent Bahati, who disappeared under suspicious circumstances after authoring poems criticizing regime policies and repression.
The regime has systematically engaged in and enabled transnational repression against dissidents abroad, including murder, kidnappings, enforced disappearances, physical attacks, and digital surveillance. In 2022, the regime abducted US-based humanitarian and opposition politician Paul Rusesagagina by drugging and luring him on a flight from Dubai in an elaborate operation of extraordinary rendition that Kagame called “flawless.” Rusesabagina had previously escaped assassination attempts and suffered intimidation from Rwandan agents while living in Belgium. In 2010, the regime extradited RPF dissident and opposition politician Deogratias Mushayidi following his arrest in Tanzania. He was sentenced to life in prison on trumped-up anti-state charges. The regime is also suspected of ordering the assassinations of other opponents such as Revocat Karemangingo in Maputo in 2021, Feif Bamporiki in Cape Town in 202, and Emmanuel Munyaneza in Kampala in 2022.
The RPF also carries out digital transnational repression. In 2021, digital forensics experts found Pegasus spyware on the phones of Rusesabagina’s daughter, Carine Kanimba, and determined that the spyware allowed the regime to monitor her activities and movements. An Amnesty International release stated that over 3,500 activists and dissidents were targeted by the Rwandan authorities. Finally, the regime also resorts to retaliation against family members of dissidents. For example, Rwandan police forcibly disappeared the brothers of exiled activist Noel Zihabamwe a month after he gave an interview to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation about harassment at the hands of regime representatives in Australia.
Institutions largely fail to serve as independent checks on the regime. The concentration of power around Kagame and his cronies and the RPF’s absolute capture of all state institutions across all branches of government negates any check to the regime’s power.
Courts have systematically and unfairly failed to check the regime’s attempts to significantly undermine electoral competition or make the electoral process significantly skewed in its favor. Rwanda’s judiciary operates largely as an extension of the executive, with top officials appointed by President Kagame and confirmed by the RPF-dominated Senate. Courts have historically upheld disqualifications of opposition candidates on technical grounds, such as in the case of Victoire Ingabire in the 2024 election. In March 2024, the High Court denied Ingabire’s request to have her civic rights rehabilitated, a decision that rendered her ineligible to contest the presidential election despite having been pardoned for earlier convictions. Similarly, the High Court in Kigali sided with the regime-controlled National Electoral Commission in its unsubstantiated allegations that Diane Rwigara, the presidential challenger in the 2017 election, presented forged and insufficient nomination signatures, a decision which prevented her from running in the presidential race. She was held in pre-trial detention for a year until she was released on bail in 2018.
Courts have systematically, frequently, and unfairly enabled the regime’s attempts to repress criticism or retaliate against those who express open opposition to its most prominent, widely publicized policies. Working hand in hand with the police, magistrates have entertained vague or unfounded politically-motivated charges against opponents of the regime, convicted them, ignored or dismissed well-founded claims of violations of their rights to a fair trial, such as coerced confessions and torture. For example, the High Court in Kigali sentenced political opposition figure Paul Rusesabagina to 25 years of imprisonment on vague terrorism charges in 2021, based on his leadership role in the opposition party Rwanda Movement for Democratic Change, and alleged links to the party’s armed wing. He was extrajudicially brought to Rwanda in 2020, but the court rejected well-founded claims of kidnapping, enforced disappearance, ill-treatment, and fair trial violations raised during his trial.
In a rare April 2019 decision, Rwanda’s Supreme Court ruled that a law passed by the regime banning and criminalizing the publication of political cartoons was unconstitutional. As unprecedented and as exceptional a decision as this was, the Court nonetheless maintained an exemption for the president, exemplifying its deference to the regime’s executive.
Judicial, legislative, and executive institutions have systematically, frequently, and unfairly failed to hold regime officials accountable. Systematically, the legislative and judicial institutions of Rwanda fail to hold regime officials accountable for abuses such as torture, arbitrary detentions, extrajudicial killings, and support for armed groups abroad. Journalist Dieudonne Niyonsenga and Aimable Karasira both alleged torture during their detentions, and the courts took no judicial action against the perpetrators. Journalist Theoneste Nsengimana has been held in pretrial detention without resolution since October 2021, with experts decrying the arbitrary nature of the detention and highlighting that the courts have not effectively addressed torture allegations. Additionally, legislatively, parliament has not initiated any investigations or demanded accountability for the many documented killings and disappearances of dissidents abroad. In 2015, parliament also extended the influence of the executive by approving changes that allowed President Kagame to hold indefinite terms. No legislative probes have been opened in Rwanda’s support for the AFC-M23 rebels, and there has been impunity for attacks that have killed civilians.
HRF classifies Rwanda as ruled by a fully authoritarian regime.
Rwanda is a semi-presidential system. The Head of State, Paul Kagame, seized de facto power in July 1994 as the military commander of the rebel Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), which prevailed in a civil war capped by the worst genocide since World War II. The mayhem was the last turn in over three decades of bloody power struggles between and within the country’s two main communities: the minority Tutsi and the majority Hutu. Since then, Kagame and the RPF have consolidated absolute power and captured the state through systematic repression of dissent, closing of civil and political space, constitutional manipulation, and the staging of sham elections.
National elections are a sham, to the point where the real, mainstream political opposition does not have a realistic chance to meaningfully compete and possibly win. Since 2003, the ruling Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) has staged unfree, unfair, and uncompetitive national elections in which it has claimed implausible, astronomically high vote shares after completely skewing the electoral playing field in its favor through the systematic jailing or barring of main opposition challengers and obstruction of main opposition campaigning. With absolute control of state institutions and resources and no checks to the regime’s power, the incumbent’s advantage is insurmountable.
Independent media, political leaders, civil society leaders, organizations, and regular people face overt and systematic retaliation if they openly criticize or challenge the regime. Independent journalists reporting on public corruption and human rights abuses have suffered physical and online intimidation, imprisonment, enforced disappearances, or suspicious deaths. Political dissidents and other critics of the regime have suffered the same fates, with the regime waging an exceptionally broad and deadly transnational repression against them.
Institutions largely fail to serve as independent checks on the regime. Rwanda is a patrimonial regime with power concentrated around Kagame and his cronies, and state institutions across all branches of government are completely captured by the RPF. In this context, legislative, judicial, and key oversight bodies do not serve as a check to executive power.
National elections are a sham, to the point where the real, mainstream political opposition does not have a realistic chance to meaningfully compete and possibly win. Since Rwanda’s first-ever multi-party elections in 2003, the regime has staged unfree, unfair, and uncompetitive polls in which it systematically claims victory with implausible, astronomical vote shares. Elections occur in the context of significant restrictions on opposition figures, intimidation, a lack of genuine competition, and an overall highly controlled environment.
The regime has systematically and unfairly barred real, mainstream opposition parties or candidates from competing in elections. The RPF regime has negated the opposition’s chances to meaningfully compete by denying main opposition figures access to the ballot and legal registration of their parties. For example, the regime-controlled National Electoral Commission (NEC) has systematically and unfairly denied legal registration to the parties of Kagame’s two most serious political opponents: The People Salvation Movement of Diana Rwigara and the DALFA-Umurinzi of Victoire Ingabire. NEC arbitrarily disqualified Ingabire, Rwigara, and Bernard Ntaganda of the registered Social Party Imberakuri from running in the 2024 election.
The RPF regime has systematically, unfairly, and significantly hindered real, mainstream opposition parties’ or candidates’ electoral campaigns. It has followed a pattern of harassing, intimidating, and imprisoning the most serious opposition presidential candidates on trumped-up charges after they announce their candidacy. Examples include Pasteur Bizimungu ahead of the 2003 election, Victoire Ingabire and Bernard Ntaganda ahead of the 2010 elections, and Diane Rwigara ahead of the 2017 elections. In addition, members, aides, and supporters of the main political opponents have suffered regime-enabled intimidation and suspicious enforced disappearances and deaths ahead of elections. For example, a month before the 2010 elections, Andrei Kagwa Rwisereka, Vice-President of the opposition Democratic Green Party, which was barred from the ballot, went missing before his decapitated body was later found. In May 2017, five months before the general elections, Jean Damascene Habarugira, a local representative of Ingabire’s unregistered party, went missing after being called to meet a local security official. His dead body later turned up in a hospital. During the same 2017 campaign, Diane Rwigara and opposition politician Philippe Mpayimana both reported harassment and intimidation of their representatives while they sought to collect the signatures needed in support of their nomination.
The regime has systematically enjoyed significant and unfair campaign advantages.
These unfair campaign advantages derive from the RPF’s total capture of the state machinery, extending to loyal decentralized administration (presidentially-appointed district governors) and its cells of political enforcers present in every community in the country. For example, during the 2024 election campaign, local authorities ordered community and business leaders to collect contributions to the RPF from residents and their staff for the RPF campaign, ordered businesses to shut down and adorn streets with RPF colors, and aided party enforcers in pushing their constituents to attend RPF rallies. The main opposition candidate allowed on the ballot, Frank Habineza of the DGPR, reported that in one instance, authorities in a district fined a shop that sold energy drinks to his campaign staff.
State assets are also leveraged to skew political competition in favor of the ruling RPF, and advertising revenue is allocated more heavily toward pro-government reporting. Election coverage is often dominated by government-controlled outlets and provides favorable exposure to the ruling RPF while restricting coverage of opposition parties. This points to another pattern of state resources being used disproportionately in favor of the ruling RPF party, specifically during campaign seasons.
Independent electoral oversight has been systematically and seriously undermined. The National Electoral Commission (NEC), which has oversight authority over the voters registry, approval of candidacies, access to public media organs during electoral campaigns, and resolution of electoral disputes, has been under heavy influence or control of the regime since its inception in 2005. This is due to the concentration of powers of nomination and appointment of its commissioners in the Presidency, the cabinet, and the Senate, which are all RPF-controlled. The Presidency controls the compensation of NEC commissioners.
The regime has skewed the electoral playing field so much so that it generally claims victory with a very high vote share. In each election since 2003, the regime-controlled NEC has coronated Kagame with over 90% of the vote, and credited the RPF-led coalition with majorities among elected parliamentary seats in legislative polls – margins so extreme that they suggest a lack of authentic competition. The July 2024 elections continued this pattern with Kagame claiming over 99% of the vote and a voter turnout of 98.2%. Main opposition candidate Frank Habineza (DGPR) was credited with only 0.5% of the vote share, and Philippe Mpayimana (independent) only 0.32%.
Independent media, political leaders, civil society leaders, organizations, and regular people face overt and systematic retaliation if they openly criticize or challenge the regime. The RPF and non-state actors aligned with the RPF heavily manipulate information. Journalists, dissidents, critics, and political opponents have been victims of physical, digital, and transnational harassment, threats, arbitrary arrests, imprisonment, torture, enforced disappearances, and suspicious deaths.
The regime has systematically and heavily manipulated media coverage in its favor. The regime’s relentless decimation of the country’s once vibrant independent newspapers, a severely restricted civic space, and the imprisonment, death, or flight into exile of many independent journalists and human rights defenders have allowed the regime to dominate and fill the national and digital information space with propaganda flattering Kagame and demonizing dissenters. The regime and its affiliates control national public media such as the Rwanda Broadcasting Agency, but also the dominant private news outlets such as Rushyasha and The New Times.
Non-state actors with ties to the regime have systematically contributed to heavily manipulating media coverage. A digital army of social media accounts aligned with the regime systematically amplifies RPF propaganda and disinformation campaigns. For example, in 2024, a Clemson University Media Forensics Hub study identified a large AI-powered coordinated RPF-aligned influence campaign on X involving 464 accounts and over 650,000 messages pushing pro-Kagame narratives and talking points online.
Non-state actors with ties to the regime have systematically contributed to seriously intimidating independent, dissenting media, political leaders, civil society leaders, organizations, or members of the general public. A digital army of social media accounts aligned with the RPF systematically conducts coordinated campaigns attacking critics and opponents of the regime. For example, the Clemson study found that the coordinated RPF-aligned influence campaign on X generated thousands of posts to partially demonize critics of the regime. Social media accounts affiliated with the RPF systematically carry out coordinated smear campaigns against critics and opponents.
Over the course of Kagame’s rule, the regime has relentlessly decimated the independent press with threats, intimidation, lawfare, and imprisonment, forcing critical outlets to close or self-censor or journalists to flee into exile. As the remaining independent journalists moved to online news channels, the regime cracked down on them. In 2021, Dieudonné Niyonsenga, who reported on human rights on his YouTube news channel Ishema TV, was sentenced to seven years in prison on trumped-up charges of forging press cards, impersonating a journalist, and “obstructing the implementation of government-ordered works and humiliating the leadership of the country and public service officers and those in charge of security.” Another journalist, Théoneste Nsengimana Umubavu TV, has been in prison since October 2021 for planning to cover an event organized by DALFA-Umurinzi members.
Several critical journalists have also been murdered in suspicious circumstances. Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) has documented nine journalists murdered or missing since 1996. The most recent case is the suspicious 2023 death in what the police claimed was a traffic accident of leading independent journalist John Williams Ntwali. Prior to his death, Ntwali had been arbitrarily imprisoned and persecuted for his work investigating corruption, injustices, and human rights abuses, including torture of political prisoners. He had reported several regime assassination attempts, which he claimed were staged as accidents.
The regime has systematically, seriously, and unfairly censored dissenting speech. The regime abuses vague speech laws criminalizing incitement, the spreading of “false information,” or the “publication of rumors,” and the vague offenses of “genocide ideology” and genocide denial to stifle legitimate discussion, testimonies, accounts, and stories contradicting the official regime-sanctioned narrative of the 1994 genocide and reconciliation. The regime has abused these laws to jail several critics. They include Aimable Karasira, a former university lecturer, political commentator, and Tutsi genocide survivorimprisoned since 2021 on trumped-up charges of denying and justifying the genocide for discussing the RPF post-genocide mass atrocities, a state taboo in Rwanda. Yvonne Idamanage, an online commentator who discussed poverty, the regime’s mistreatment of genocide survivors, and political exploitation of genocide memorials, was sentenced to 15 years in jail on trumped-up charges of “inciting violence.” In 2014, the regime sentenced popular singer Kizito Mihigo, also a Tutsi genocide survivor, to ten years in prison on trumped-up anti-state charges for releasing a song criticizing the state policy of recognizing Tutsi as the only victims of the Rwanda story.
The RPF has systematically killed or forcibly disappeared dissidents or attempted to commit these crimes. In 1996, Paul Rusesabagina fled Rwanda after escaping an assassination attempt at the hands of an RPF soldier. In 2019, Kagame publicly admitted to the regime’s assassination of former Interior Minister and former senior RPF figure Seth Sendashonga in Nairobi in 1998. Sendashonga became a target after denouncing the regime’s post-genocide massacres of tens of thousands of mostly Hutu civilians. The same year, South Africa’s National Prosecution Authority issued arrest warrants for two Rwandans accused of murdering regime opponent Patrick Karegeya, a RPF co-founder and Rwanda’s former spy chief, who was strangled in his hotel room in Johannesburg on January 1, 2014. South African authorities held the Rwandan regime responsible for the murder. Furthermore, an atmosphere of intimidation has been exacerbated by a pattern of enforced disappearances of regime critics in total impunity. An example is the case of prominent poet and genocide survivor Innocent Bahati, who disappeared under suspicious circumstances after authoring poems criticizing regime policies and repression.
The regime has systematically engaged in and enabled transnational repression against dissidents abroad, including murder, kidnappings, enforced disappearances, physical attacks, and digital surveillance. In 2022, the regime abducted US-based humanitarian and opposition politician Paul Rusesagagina by drugging and luring him on a flight from Dubai in an elaborate operation of extraordinary rendition that Kagame called “flawless.” Rusesabagina had previously escaped assassination attempts and suffered intimidation from Rwandan agents while living in Belgium. In 2010, the regime extradited RPF dissident and opposition politician Deogratias Mushayidi following his arrest in Tanzania. He was sentenced to life in prison on trumped-up anti-state charges. The regime is also suspected of ordering the assassinations of other opponents such as Revocat Karemangingo in Maputo in 2021, Feif Bamporiki in Cape Town in 202, and Emmanuel Munyaneza in Kampala in 2022.
The RPF also carries out digital transnational repression. In 2021, digital forensics experts found Pegasus spyware on the phones of Rusesabagina’s daughter, Carine Kanimba, and determined that the spyware allowed the regime to monitor her activities and movements. An Amnesty International release stated that over 3,500 activists and dissidents were targeted by the Rwandan authorities. Finally, the regime also resorts to retaliation against family members of dissidents. For example, Rwandan police forcibly disappeared the brothers of exiled activist Noel Zihabamwe a month after he gave an interview to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation about harassment at the hands of regime representatives in Australia.
Institutions largely fail to serve as independent checks on the regime. The concentration of power around Kagame and his cronies and the RPF’s absolute capture of all state institutions across all branches of government negates any check to the regime’s power.
Courts have systematically and unfairly failed to check the regime’s attempts to significantly undermine electoral competition or make the electoral process significantly skewed in its favor. Rwanda’s judiciary operates largely as an extension of the executive, with top officials appointed by President Kagame and confirmed by the RPF-dominated Senate. Courts have historically upheld disqualifications of opposition candidates on technical grounds, such as in the case of Victoire Ingabire in the 2024 election. In March 2024, the High Court denied Ingabire’s request to have her civic rights rehabilitated, a decision that rendered her ineligible to contest the presidential election despite having been pardoned for earlier convictions. Similarly, the High Court in Kigali sided with the regime-controlled National Electoral Commission in its unsubstantiated allegations that Diane Rwigara, the presidential challenger in the 2017 election, presented forged and insufficient nomination signatures, a decision which prevented her from running in the presidential race. She was held in pre-trial detention for a year until she was released on bail in 2018.
Courts have systematically, frequently, and unfairly enabled the regime’s attempts to repress criticism or retaliate against those who express open opposition to its most prominent, widely publicized policies. Working hand in hand with the police, magistrates have entertained vague or unfounded politically-motivated charges against opponents of the regime, convicted them, ignored or dismissed well-founded claims of violations of their rights to a fair trial, such as coerced confessions and torture. For example, the High Court in Kigali sentenced political opposition figure Paul Rusesabagina to 25 years of imprisonment on vague terrorism charges in 2021, based on his leadership role in the opposition party Rwanda Movement for Democratic Change, and alleged links to the party’s armed wing. He was extrajudicially brought to Rwanda in 2020, but the court rejected well-founded claims of kidnapping, enforced disappearance, ill-treatment, and fair trial violations raised during his trial.
In a rare April 2019 decision, Rwanda’s Supreme Court ruled that a law passed by the regime banning and criminalizing the publication of political cartoons was unconstitutional. As unprecedented and as exceptional a decision as this was, the Court nonetheless maintained an exemption for the president, exemplifying its deference to the regime’s executive.
Judicial, legislative, and executive institutions have systematically, frequently, and unfairly failed to hold regime officials accountable. Systematically, the legislative and judicial institutions of Rwanda fail to hold regime officials accountable for abuses such as torture, arbitrary detentions, extrajudicial killings, and support for armed groups abroad. Journalist Dieudonne Niyonsenga and Aimable Karasira both alleged torture during their detentions, and the courts took no judicial action against the perpetrators. Journalist Theoneste Nsengimana has been held in pretrial detention without resolution since October 2021, with experts decrying the arbitrary nature of the detention and highlighting that the courts have not effectively addressed torture allegations. Additionally, legislatively, parliament has not initiated any investigations or demanded accountability for the many documented killings and disappearances of dissidents abroad. In 2015, parliament also extended the influence of the executive by approving changes that allowed President Kagame to hold indefinite terms. No legislative probes have been opened in Rwanda’s support for the AFC-M23 rebels, and there has been impunity for attacks that have killed civilians.
