Rwanda rights group says detention abuses make jail 'place of fear'

French president Emmanuel Macron (R) welcomes his Rwandan counterpart Paul Kagame ahead of their meeting on the sideline of the 19th Summit of the Francophonie at the Grand Palais in Paris, on October 5, 2024. [AFP]

Rwandan authorities are perpetrating serious human rights abuses in detention facilities, including torturing inmates, Human Rights Watch said Tuesday, denouncing a lack of accountability for those responsible.

Under President Paul Kagame's three-decade rule, political dissent and free speech have been crushed, with international campaigners long decrying the shrinking civil rights space in the small East African country.

HRW's report is based on interviews between 2019 and 2024 with almost 30 people, including former inmates, as well as court documents and interviews shared online.

It described how "serious human rights abuses, including torture, are pervasive in many of Rwanda's detention facilities", saying it believed only one senior prison official, Innocent Kayumba, had been held accountable.

HRW said it had contacted the government in September over the report's findings but had not received a response by the time of publication.

Interviews with former detainees at Kwa Gacinya, which HRW said was an "unofficial detention facility" under the control of police in the capital Kigali, revealed a "pattern of ill-treatment, mock executions, beatings, and torture that dates back to at least 2011".

"It was a place of fear," opposition member Venant Abayisenga, who was held there in 2017, said in a 2020 interview.

Abayisenga -- who disappeared five months after the interview was released on a YouTube channel -- said he heard people being executed and was interrogated by police without a lawyer present.

"At one point, they brought a gun and told me they would shoot me," he said.

"There are people who are killed at Kwa Gacinya, you hear the voice of the person being killed, and then you hear someone come in to clean up the room."

'Damning evidence'

HRW reviewed court documents of 25 people accused of security-related offences, with several alleging they had been held incommunicado in "coffin-like" cells for between five to six months.

"When we arrived they beat me almost to death until I started vomiting blood," one said, alleging he was forced to confess to crimes that he was later convicted of.

HRW also collected evidence from former detainees at Rubavu and Nyarugenge prisons, the latter of which was described by one ex-inmate as "hell" with prisoners beaten in tanks of filthy water.

The rights group alleged that Rwanda had "failed to investigate or address repeated and credible allegations of torture made by detainees or former detainees since at least 2017".

Although some trials have taken place, HRW said several senior officials were acquitted "despite the apparently damning evidence against them".

Kayumba, ex-director of Rubavu and Nyarugenge prisons, was convicted of an inmate's murder and sentenced to 15 years behind bars -- but HRW said this was only "partial justice".

The report also said Rwanda would "routinely curtail" investigations, including from international bodies such as the United Nations and the International Committee of the Red Cross.

Rwanda has one of the world's highest incarceration rates with 637 prisoners for every 100,000 people, according to figures published in a 2024 report by the Institute for Crime and Justice Policy Research.