Rwandan President Paul Kagame has said he would support abolishing the death penalty for genocide suspects held by the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda in Arusha, Tanzania, if the prisoners were to be transferred to Rwandan national jurisdiction.

The independent newspaper "Umeseso" has been threatened with temporary closure and one of its reporters has had to flee the country to safety. While the Rwandan government continues to emphasize its commitment to a free press, its actions against Umeseso, for refusing to reveal its sources for some controversial articles, shows otherwise.

Godeberthe Ugirumufata strides into her office at the ICRC headquarters in Nairobi exuding the confidence of a woman who has finally found her peace and place in the society. 10 years ago, Ugirumufata thought she had lost everything in the Rwanda genocide: her son, her parents and siblings. She narrowly escaped death and fled to Kenya penniless, confused and scared. Ugirumufata, however, found happiness in Nairobi, got re-united with her family and got a job working with refugees that has given her life a new purpose.

Women ex-combatants from Rwanda have asked for a role in regional peacekeeping missions in Africa. Pointing specifically to the recent Rwandan government's commitment to support regional peacekeeping missions by sending soldiers to help protect African Union cease-fire monitors, they are urging that ex-combatant women be included in such missions, because of their experience of warfare and its particular impact on women, and their interest in assisting women caught in conflict.

The number of people suspected of participating in the 1994 genocide in Rwanda is expected to spiral from the present 100,000 to over 500,000 within the coming year, a senior official with the courts set up to try genocide suspects told Hirondelle News Agency on Wednesday. "Statistics drawn on the basis of information collected from the first phase of Gacaca court hearings indicates that we will end up with between 500,000 and 600,000 genocide suspects", the director of the legal department in National Service for Gacaca Jurisdictions(NSGJ), Augustin Nkusi said.

The Rwandan government’s pledge that its troops in Darfur will protect civilians should encourage the international community to press Sudan to accept an enlarged African Union mission with a mandate for civilian protection, Human Rights Watch says. The current African Union mandate does not specifically authorize the 154 troops to protect civilians, but Rwandan President Paul Kagame insisted that Rwandan troops would intervene if civilians are threatened. On July 27, the African Union’s Peace and Security Council proposed increasing the current ceasefire monitoring force to more than 2,000 soldiers and expanding its mandate to provide civilian protection. Seven African countries have indicated their willingness to contribute troops to such a mission, but the Sudanese government has so far refused to accept the proposal.

One of the vice-presidents of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) on Wednesday appealed to hundreds of Congolese refugees in Cyangugu, southwestern Rwanda, to return home. The refugees fled there when fighting flared at the end May between loyalist and dissident troops of the Congolese army in the town of Bukavu in eastern Congo.

Federal Government has promised to assist Rwanda rebuild its war-torn educational sector. This assurance was contained in the Memoranda of Understanding (MOU) signed between Nigeria and Rwanda. The Rwandan Minister of Education, Sciences, Technology and Scientific Research, Prof. Romain Murenzi, who is on a week-long visit to Nigeria during a courtesy visit to the Minister of Education, Professor Fabian Osuji, requested Nigeria's assistance to increase access, expansion and quality of education in Rwanda.

The president of the UN Security Council last week called upon states in the region to cooperate with the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda and for all member states of the UN to pay their dues. The Tribunal is currently facing a US $50 million funding gap and with more than half its cases yet to go to trial, will struggle to complete all of its work by 2010, the official date set for its closure.

Rwanda will use international aid to offer free generic drugs by year's end to 90,000 people infected with HIV and AIDS, a 20-fold increase in the number of people receiving treatment, an official said last Thursday. The program would treat some 100,000 people by 2007 and would be funded by $85 million in aid from the U.S. government, the World Bank and the Geneva-based Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria.

The Rwandan government granted asylum on Friday to 283 people of Rwandan descent whom officials in Kigali have classified as refugees from the Democratic Republic of Congo. The group - 172 children, 62 women and 49 men - were expelled from the neighbouring Democratic Republic of Congo earlier in the week. Local military and civilian officials in the Congo had accused them of being Rwandans.

The UN refugee agency, UNHCR, has repatriated 283 people to Rwanda in a case involving second-generation Rwandan immigrants living in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo town of Kalehe, a UNHCR official told IRIN on Tuesday. The refugees claimed that Congolese military and local officials had rounded them up from their homes in Kalehe and detained them in a military camp in Bunyakiri, before forcefully expelling them into neighbouring Rwanda, said Mussa Fazil Harerimana, the governor of Cyagungu, a Rwandan town that shares the border with the Congolese town of Bukavu.

In his first appearance before the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, Gaspard Kanyarukiga has entered a plea of not guilty. Amongst other allegations, the 59 year old, arrested last Friday in South Africa, is said to have supervised the massacre of some 2,000 Tutsi civilians taking shelter in Nyange church in 1994 by transporting police and members of the Interahamwe militia to the scene. In total he faces four charges: genocide, complicity in genocide, conspiracy to commit genocide and extermination as a crime against humanity. A date for Kanyarukiga's trial is yet to be fixed.

The end of the 2nd world war brought on the end of the era of European colonialism, ushering in a fresh breeze of freedom to billions. There were high hopes that the people who had chafed under the yoke of racism would not let racism or other prejudices stand in the way of emancipation of toiling and suffering fellow humans. Throughout human history racial and color prejudice has proven to be a more potent evil than any other prejudice.

The Rwandan military is backing a rebel group that has battled Congolese forces and U.N. peacekeepers in eastern Congo, a flagrant violation of U.N. sanctions and the terms of a fragile peace accord, an unpublished U.N. report says. The 49-page report, which was prepared by a panel of four U.N. sanctions experts, also charges that Rwandan troops forcibly entered a U.N.-controlled refugee camp in Cyangugu, Rwanda, rounded up 30 young men and pressed them to join the Congolese rebels. They were released after officials from the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees protested, according to the report, scheduled for release on Tuesday.

As part of a major restructuring of the national courts system, the government of Rwanda appointed 223 judges on Tuesday to courts at the district and provincial level, as well as to the newly created high court. The move follows the recent election of 18,540 officials to serve in mediation committees, known locally as Abunzi, which will handle disputes between members of the public before such cases are placed before national courts of law.

On 5 July 2004, Cesar Balume Wetemwami, a photojournalist and president of the North Kivu Photographers Association in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, was arrested by Rwandan military security agents in the Rwandan city of Gisenyi, which lies on the border with the Congolese city of Goma. Balume was first detained by customs officers as he was crossing into Gisenyi. According to witnesses, the photojournalist was questioned for over two hours at the border station. Following his interrogation, he was handed over to Rwandan soldiers. Balume is being held by military personnel at a secret location.

A key Rwanda genocide suspect has been handed over to U.N. prosecutors, the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) said late on Monday. Gaspard Kanyarukiga, 59, accused of a horrifying attack on a church in which 2,000 people died, was arrested in South Africa on Saturday. Charges against him include genocide, complicity in genocide, and conspiracy to commit genocide.

An appeals court at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) on Friday upheld a life sentence for Rwanda's former information minister for his role in the 1994 genocide. Eliezer Niyitegeka was jailed for life in May 2003 after the U.N. tribunal found him guilty of crimes including genocide, complicity in genocide, direct and public incitement to commit genocide, and crimes against humanity.

The recommendation from the Parliament of Rwanda that the League for the Promotion and Defence of Human Rights (LIPRODHOR) and five other NGOs be dissolved is misconceived. African Rights urges the Government of Rwanda to reject the suggestion and undertake a fuller investigation. We call upon parliamentarians to move beyond the anger expressed in the heat of the debate and consider how the sensitive and difficult issues the discussion raised may best be addressed in the interests of all the citizens of Rwanda. We encourage them to review their recommendations and to explore, in an open and inclusive manner, constructive responses.