The French Prosecution has requested the Paris Court of Appeal to find Dr. Eugène Rwamucyo guilty of crimes of the Genocide against the Tutsi of 1994 and crimes against humanity, and to sentence him to 30 years in prison.
On 30 October 2024, this court had sentenced Dr. Rwamucyo to 27 years in prison. He has been on trial on appeal since 9 June 2026, maintaining that he played no role in the crimes he is accused of in what was then Butare Prefecture.
This doctor, who headed the institution that was the National University of Rwanda’s center responsible for general medicine (CUSP), is one of the intellectuals who attended a meeting held by Jean Kambanda, who was Prime Minister, at this university.
This meeting, held on 14 May 1994, was one in which intellectuals were encouraged to take part in the Genocide against the Tutsi, and Dr. Rwamucyo is accused of giving a speech there in support of the killings.
Dr. Rwamucyo directed the burial of Tutsi who were killed in various parts of Butare, using equipment including a road-building machine known as a “caterpillar.”
The Prosecution states that he did this with the aim of concealing evidence of the Genocide, but he told the court that he never concealed the bodies of Tutsi, saying that it would not have been possible to conceal killings that had already gone on for several weeks in full view of everyone.
This doctor explained that the locations where Tutsi killed in Butare were buried were known to those who took part in these operations, but that he never made a map of them or a report about them. He said that what he did do was write records, but that they were lost when he fled in June 1994.
On 13 July 2026, Me Clothilde Hazard, representing the civil parties, said that the manner in which the Tutsi were buried, based on Dr. Rwamucyo’s instructions, was intended to conceal evidence.
She said: “What emerged in the trial is that he showed where to dig, the bodies were placed in however they could be, the graves were not even marked with a cross, there was no burial one could call dignified, and even today these graves can still be found.”
Another lawyer, Me Alice Zarka, stated that the burial operations directed by Dr. Rwamucyo constitute evidence of the Genocide, and that even 32 years after the Genocide was stopped, this evidence can still be found.
She said: “We are now finding pits, we are finding evidence of the Genocide. What happened during the Genocide is still visible. The evidence is still being uncovered. This is why raising before us the matter of hygiene and sanitation, as a way to conceal his crime and his role in directing killings that destroyed masses of people, is something that cannot be accepted at all by the victims.”
On 15 July 2026, public prosecutor Aude Duret requested that the Paris Court of Appeal find Dr. Rwamucyo guilty of genocide, both as a perpetrator and as an accomplice, and guilty of crimes against humanity as an accomplice, and that he be sentenced to 30 years in prison.
She described the accused as a zealous civil servant who knowingly embraced the genocidal ideology of the government in power at the time, and pointed to evidence linking him closely to the Coalition for the Defence of the Republic (CDR), an extremist party known for its racist and anti-Tutsi rhetoric.
Duret argued that Dr. Rwamucyo’s claim to have supervised the burials for public health reasons did not hold up, noting that no health guidelines were followed and no records were kept that would have allowed the sites to later be identified and the bodies exhumed. She said the burials stripped the victims of their humanity, reducing them to mere refuse to be disposed of. She also pointed to testimony indicating that some of those buried were still alive at the time.
She concluded her indictment by stating that erasing the memory of the genocide in this way amounted to “a continuation of their massacres.”
After the Prosecution, it was scheduled that Dr. Rwamucyo and his lawyers would present their request to the Paris Court of Appeal.
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