Disappearances ‘show Rwanda unfit to host Commonwealth summit’
London: A leading human rights barrister has questioned whether Rwanda is fit to host CHOGM this week after the disappearance of family members of an Australian activist.
Jennifer Robinson, of London’s Doughty Street Chambers has taken the case of Noel Zihabamwe to the United Nations Working Group on Enforced and Involuntary Disappearances in which two of his brothers went missing in the central African nation after they were taken into custody by police.
The case is also being supported by the Australian Human Rights Institute based out of UNSW, and law firm Corrs Chambers Westgarth.
Noel Zihabamwe who is active in the Rwandan community and whose two brothers have been missing since the Rwandan government put pressure on him to send out its message in Australia to the local community. After he refused to help the government, his brothers went missing and he fears they are dead.Credit:Louis Douvis
Earlier this year, Zihabamwe addressed a session of the group and said that more than 200 families had contacted him about similar cases since he submitted his complaint in 2021.
“The vast majority of these disappearances in Rwanda are never brought to international attention. Rwandan families suffer in silence,” he told UN experts.
Zihambamwe came to Australia in 2006 on a humanitarian visa and claims that in 2017 he was approached by members of the Rwandan government who attempted to recruit him as an agent of influence.
He refused and alleges that he was subjected to harassment from the Rwandan government and its representatives.
After he shared his case anonymously with the ABC in 2019, Rwandan police were identified by witnesses as abducting his brothers, Jean Nsengimana and Antoine Zihabamwe, from a bus they were travelling on in an eastern province of Rwanda.
The pair has not been seen since.
Jennifer Robinson, Human Rights Barrister, Doughty Street Chambers.
Enforced disappearances have been reported in Rwanda since the Rwandan Patriotic Front came to power in 1994 following the country’s civil war and genocide. These abductions have been widely condemned by governments, including Australia and the United States, the UN and human rights organisations.
The Rwandan government denies involvement, but Robinson said their explanations for Jean and Antoine’s disappearance was “wholly unsatisfactory”.
“They’re saying that the brothers left the country voluntarily but they don’t give any explanation for why the police took them off the bus or any explanation for why it would be that two men – who have children, family or relatives – would not find a way to get in contact,” she told The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.
“Our hope was that they were perhaps still detained unlawfully, but we are fast losing hope that we will find them alive,” she said.
Robinson, who is also the lawyer for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, called on Australia and Britain to raise the issue during the summit.
“Rwanda is the host country, Commonwealth countries have shared values, Rwanda subscribes to international law and international human rights treaties and has an obligation to comply with them.”
She also questioned whether CHOGM, which Prince Charles will head this week, should even be held in Kigali.
“There are real questions to be asked about whether Rwanda ought to have been permitted to host the event, but if the strategy is one of engagement where governments want to go there, then they ought to use the opportunity of CHOGM for that critical engagement which is to raise this issue,” she said.
Michela Wrong, author of Do Not Disturb. The story of a political murder and an African regime gone bad, an investigation into political assassinations in Rwanda under President Paul Kagame, said Zihambamwe’s story was all too familiar.
“Kagame appears to believe in collective punishment and what you often see in Rwanda is family members and friends being made to pay the price for the activism of a relative,” Wrong said.
Foreign Minister Penny Wong, the Rwandan government and the British foreign office were all contacted for comment.
Boris Johnson’s British government is also attempting to fly some asylum seekers to Rwanda as part of an attempt to discourage them from taking risky boat voyages across the channel, but the plan was last week blocked by the European Court of Human Rights.
Last year, the government, then led by former prime minister Scott Morrison, told the United Nation’s Universal Periodic Review of Rwanda that Australia was concerned about reports of enforced disappearances, arbitrary arrests and unlawful killings.
Australia recommended that Rwanda eliminate all cases of enforced disappearances and ensure that all alleged cases were thoroughly and impartially investigated and perpetrators brought to justice.
It also called on Rwanda to increase transparency in its legal system and commission independent investigations into allegations of extrajudicial killings, arbitrary arrests, deaths in custody and unlawful detentions.
As well, it called for the repeal of its 2018 offence of “spreading false information or harmful propaganda with intent to cause a hostile international opinion against the Rwandan government” and “insults or defamation against the president”.
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