Human rights in Rwanda
The immediate targets of the invasion were the large Hutu refugee camps located right across the border in the vicinity of Goma and Bukavu, which were organized under the leadership of the former regime.
[4] The Rwandan army chased the refugees in hot pursuit clear across Zaire, while helping to install AFDL in power in Kinshasa.
[5] In 2010, the United Nations issued a report investigating 617 alleged violent incidents occurring in the Democratic Republic of Congo between March 1993 and June 2003.
[9] According to a report by Amnesty International, between December 1997 and May 1998, thousands of Rwandans "disappeared" or were murdered by members of government security forces and of armed opposition groups.
Amnesty wrote that "Thousands of unarmed civilians have been extrajudicially executed by RPA soldiers in the context of military search operations in the northwest.
"[10] When Kagame visited Washington in early 2001, Human Rights Watch criticized Rwanda for its involvement in the Second Congo War in which "as many as 1.7 million" civilians had died.
In 2009, Human Rights Watch claimed that under the pretense of maintaining ethnic harmony, Kagame's government displays "a marked intolerance of the most basic forms of dissent."
Reporters Without Borders stated that "Rwanda, Yemen and Syria have joined Burma and North Korea as the most repressive countries in the world against journalists",[22] adding that in Rwanda, "the third lowest-ranked African country", "this drop was caused by the suspending of the main independent press media, the climate of terror surrounding the presidential election, and the murdering, in Kigali, of the deputy editor of Umuvugizi, Jean-Léonard Rugambage.
[26] It urged the Rwandan government to enact legislation enabling freedom of information and to "authorise the presence of an opposition in the next election".
[27] It also emphasised abuses carried out by Rwandan troops in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and described Rwanda's overall human rights situation as "very poor":[28] The report details a country in which democracy, freedom of speech, the press and human rights are undermined or violently abused, in which courts fail to meet international standards, and a country which has invaded its neighbour, the Democratic Republic of Congo, four times since 1994.
[29]In the lead-up to the 2010 presidential election, the United Nations "demanded a full investigation into allegations of politically motivated killings of opposition figures".
[30][31] In 2011, Amnesty International criticized the continued detention of former transportation minister and Bizimungu ally Charles Ntakirutinka, who was seven years into a ten-year sentence at Kigali central prison.
In a letter to US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Senator Robert Menendez called for a comprehensive review of US policy towards Rwanda.
