France puts ex-policeman on trial over Rwanda genocide

A Paris court heard the charges against Philippe Hategekimana, who is charged with genocide and crimes against humanity in his home country.

The trial is the latest to be held in France of alleged participants in the 1994 massacres, in which 800,000 people, most of them ethnic Tutsis, died.

"My name is Philippe Manier," said the accused — using an assumed name — when the president of the assize court, Jean-Marc Lavergne, asked him to state his identity.

What are the charges against the suspect?

Prosecutors allege that Hategekimana was involved in the murder of dozens of Tutsis as well as setting up roadblocks to stop members of the ethnic group.

The detainees were murdered in and around the southern provincial capital of Nyanza, where Hategekimana worked as a senior police official.

Plaintiffs accuse the now 66-year-old of "using the powers and military force conferred to him through his rank in order to... take part in the genocide."

Hategekimana is also accused of involvement in the murder of both a nun and the mayor of the town of Ntyazo. Both had opposed the executions.

He is also accused of having a role in the killing of 300 Tutsi refugees at a hill named Nyamugari, and with involvement in an attack at another hill, Nyabubare, where some 1,000 civilians were slaughtered.

The trial is set to last until June 30. Hategekimana denies the charges.

Decades under an assumed name

Hategekimana fled to France, where he obtained refugee status, after the genocide under the name Philippe Manier.

He worked as a security guard at a university in the western city of Rennes and gained French citizenship in 2005.

Hategekimana left France and headed to Cameroon in late 2017 after learning that the Collective of Civil Parties for Rwanda (CPCR), which is among the current plaintiffs, had filed a charge against him.

Police arrested him in the capital, Yaounde, in 2018 and he was extradited to France where the charges were filed.

Questions of jurisdiction

France became one of the main destinations for fugitives connected with crimes of genocide and the country has convicted several figures since 2014.

For a long time, the legal fate of suspected refugees in France was one of the points of tension in the complicated relationship between Paris and Kigali, poisoned by the question of France's role in the genocide.

President Paul Kagame had accused Paris of denying Rwanda jurisdiction, although relations warmed considerably since a report commissioned by President Emmanuel Macron and released in 2021 recognized France's "overwhelming" responsibilities in failing to halt the massacres.

The location of hearings can depend on numerous factors including the nature of crimes committed, jurisdiction, availability of evidence, and the mandates and capacity of the courts themselves.

The majority of Rwanda genocide trials were in Rwanda's domestic courts while the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR)  in the Tanzanian city of Arusha was primarily focused on prosecuting high-ranking or prominent individuals.

The ICTR's work was taken over by the UN's International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals (MICT) in Arusha and in the Dutch city of The Hague.

Former colonial power Belgium has also held several trials related to the Rwanda genocides, and there have been a dozen or so convictions in Canada, Finland, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, and the United States.

AFP contributed to this report.

Edited by Jenipher Camino Gonzalez

A previous version of this article mistakenly referred to The Hague as the Dutch capital. Although it is the political and judicial center of the country, Amsterdam is the official capital. The department apologizes for the error.