Rwandan authorities are committing serious human rights abuses in detention facilities, including torturing inmates, according to a report released by Human Rights Watch (HRW) on Tuesday. The organization condemned the lack of accountability for those responsible for these abuses.
Under President Paul Kagame’s three-decade rule, political dissent and free speech have been stifled, with international advocates long lamenting the shrinking space for civil rights in the small East African nation. HRW’s report is based on interviews conducted between 2019 and 2024 with nearly 30 individuals, including former inmates, as well as court documents and online interviews.
The report stated, “Serious human rights abuses, including torture, are pervasive in many of Rwanda’s detention facilities,” noting that it believed only one senior prison official, Innocent Kayumba, had faced any accountability for these acts. HRW reached out to the Rwandan government in September regarding the report’s findings but had not received a response by the time of publication.
Interviews with former detainees at Kwa Gacinya, described by HRW as an “unofficial detention facility” operated by the police in the capital, Kigali, revealed a “pattern of ill-treatment, mock executions, beatings, and torture that dates back to at least 2011.” Opposition member Venant Abayisenga, who was held there in 2017, shared his experience in a 2020 interview, stating, “It was a place of fear.” He disappeared five months after the interview was released on a YouTube channel.
Abayisenga recalled, “At one point, they brought a gun and told me they would shoot me.” He added, “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.”
HRW examined court documents of 25 individuals accused of security-related offenses, with many alleging they had been held incommunicado in “coffin-like” cells for five to six months. One detainee recounted, “When we arrived, they beat me almost to death until I started vomiting blood,” alleging that he was forced to confess to crimes for which he was later convicted.
The organization also gathered 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 filthy water tanks. HRW claimed that Rwanda had “failed to investigate or address repeated and credible allegations of torture made by detainees or former detainees since at least 2017.”
While some trials have occurred, HRW noted that several senior officials were acquitted “despite the apparently damning evidence against them.” Kayumba, the former director of Rubavu and Nyarugenge prisons, was convicted of an inmate’s murder and sentenced to 15 years in prison, but HRW characterized this as 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.