French journalist acquitted in trial for denial of genocide in Rwanda in 1994

A French court on Thursday rejected the claim for damages brought by two associations against journalist Natacha Polony, editor-in-chief of the weekly magazine Marianne, for denying the genocide of Tutsis in Rwanda in 1994, an unprecedented case in France.

‘No civil misconduct is characterized’stated the President of the Court of Appeal of Paris, confirming the judgment of the first instance of May 20, 2022.

The court considered that “the comments are not characteristic of a challenge to the crime of genocide,” it said in its verdict, consulted by the France-Presse agency.

The editor-in-chief of the weekly magazine Marianne, who was present at the deliberation, was accused of comments made on March 18, 2018 on France Inter radio.

“Unfortunately, we’re typically in the kind of case where we have villains versus other villains (…), there weren’t the good guys on one side and the bad guys on the other in the story,” he said.

These statements caused controversy and led the association that supports the victims of the Rwandan genocide, Ibuka France, to file a complaint with the civil party, which was joined by the Mrap – Movement against racism and for friendship between peoples.

If the phrases used “cannot but be difficult for the victims of genocide, they do not characterize the desire to scandalously trivialize their existence,” the court stated in its ruling.

At the hearing, the journalist explained that the term “rogues” referred to the leaders and not the population and to the “crimes of Paul Kagame’s Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF, with a Tutsi majority) committed before, during and after the genocide “. .

The court of Paris had already reached the same conclusion in May 2022, seeing in the words of the journalist “a denial of the existence of the genocide” was an “extrapolation of (her) words”.

According to the United Nations (UN), between April and July 1994, more than 800,000 people, mostly members of the Tutsi minority, were slaughtered in appalling conditions, a genocide orchestrated by the Hutu-majority government.