By Human Rights Watch Press
Published April 24, 2020
Rwandan police have arbitrarily arrested and detained scores of people in stadia without due process or legal authority since directives to prevent the spread of Covid-19 came into force on March 22, 2020.
“Government directives to prevent the spread of Covid-19 do not give security forces carte blanche to ignore the rule of law and commit abuses against the population while locking up those trying to expose them,” said Lewis Mudge, Central Africa director at Human Rights Watch.
RELATED: Rwanda’s Travel and Tourism Economy on the Upsurge
Since April 8, four bloggers who had reported abuses and one of the bloggers’ drivers have been arrested and detained for allegedly violating the government directives. After years of state interference and intimidation, most print and broadcast media are heavily dominated by pro-government views, but lately more sensitive reporting on social and human rights issues has been posted on online blogs and YouTube channels.
In a video posted on Ishema TV’s YouTube channel on April 3, three women from Kangondo II – a poor neighborhood also known as “Bannyahe,” in Remera sector of Kigali, the capital – told journalists that soldiers enforcing the lockdown raped them. One victim said that one night in March, a man in military uniform with a gun came into her house and raped her, while another hung her husband up by his legs from the window and beat him.
RELATED: Tanzania Forces Apology Out of Kenyan TV Network as COVID-19 Spreads
Another said she saw men being beaten while a man in military uniform forced her with the butt of his rifle to enter a neighbor’s house: “He raped me…. But what could I do when he was armed? How could I cry out when they were beating people outside with no intervention from the authorities?”
Four bloggers working for Afrimax TV, Ishema TV, and Umubavu TV, which reported on the rapes and the impact of the directives on vulnerable populations, have been arrested in circumstances that appear retaliatory. In recent months, they had also shared testimonies about a long-standing dispute with authorities over land evictions in “Bannyahe.”
The Rwanda Media Commission said in a statement on April 13 that none of the detained journalists were arrested in relation to their work and that online bloggers, such as those using YouTube, are not journalists and are “not authorized to interview the population.”
