Human rights watchdog Amnesty International has asked Rwanda to review its laws on 'genocide ideology', saying they are being used as a guise to suppress political opposition and freedom of speech.

Rwanda says the laws are necessary to prevent a repeat of the 1994 genocide in which 800,000 ethnic Tutsis and moderate Hutus were slaughtered. The killing was only stopped when troops under current President Paul Kagame took control of the country.

Political repression
But rights groups have warned that political repression has been on the increase in Rwanda, especially in the run up to presidential elections earlier in August.
In its report named Safer to Stay Silent, Amnesty International said the vague wording of the 'genocide ideology' and 'sectarianism' laws could be abused to criminalise dissent by opposition politicians, journalists and rights activists.

Amnesty said it found that many Rwandans, even those with specialist knowledge of Rwandan law including lawyers and human rights workers, were unable to precisely define what genocide ideology meant.

Prison
Two opposition candidates and a newspaper editor were arrested and charged with, among other things, ‘genocide ideology' in the lead up to the August 7 poll.
The BBC and VOA have both been accused of disseminating ‘genocide ideology' by the government. These accusations led to the suspension of the BBC Kinyarwanda service for two months from April 2009.

But Rwandan legal authorities disputed the Amnesty report, arguing their laws should not be interpreted or clarified by foreign entities. They said their laws have been put in place by competent institutions and are specific to Rwanda’s problems and society.

Genocide ideology law
Rwanda's ‘genocide ideology' law was introduced in 2008 and the ‘sectarianism' law in 2001. According to government figures, there were 1,034 trials related to ‘genocide ideology' in 2007-2008. Rwanda's government announced a review of the law in April.

The Amnesty report said at a local level individuals used the genocide ideology accusations to settle personal disputes.