{The government will soon contact the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) to find out if it is within the rights of a genocide convict to get airplay on a public television which he uses to cleanse his name and also negate the very genocide.}
This follows a news programme by a British commercial television network, ITV, which aired on Tuesday evening, featuring Jean Kambanda, the former prime minister of the genocidal government currently serving a life sentence at Koulikoro high-security Prison in Mali.
Kambanda was in 1998 convicted on all the six charges he was facing, all connected to the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi.
“It is obscene…ITV is a commercial television channel, and the only conclusion is someone is probably paying for this. The whole world knows Kambanda is a Genocide convict who was at the heart of the Genocide and for him to get airtime to try to cleanse himself of the very crimes he was convicted for, is shocking,” Justice Minister Johnston Busingye told The New Times yesterday.
During the ITV interview, Kambanda, who exhausted all legal procedures after the Appeals Chamber of the ICTR upheld his life sentence, said he was tricked into entering a guilty plea, which forms basis for human rights activists to link the interview to Genocide denial.
“Any court judgment that has exhausted all appeal processes automatically becomes law. Asking a convict about the same crime he was convicted of is not only holding in contempt the judgment, but most importantly, the crime for which the person was convicted,” said Laurent Nkongoli, an international law expert and member of the Rwanda National Human Rights Commission.
He added that any interview can only be granted when a convict has lodged a case in court pertaining to the charges, and this has to be done through a lawyer.
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