Rwandan police asked to release US attorney

By Tom Odula
Associated Press Writer
May 29, 2010

NAIROBI, Kenya—An international lawyers' group on Saturday called for the immediate release of an American lawyer charged with genocide denial in Rwanda.

Peter Erlinder, who is in Rwanda to help defend an opposition presidential hopeful against charges that include promoting genocidal ideology, was arrested Friday by Rwandan police.

The International Criminal Defense Attorneys Association urged individual lawyers and organizations to demand his immediate release, which they say is politically motivated.

"They are political charges, that's all they are," Alison Turner, a board member of the ICDAA, told The Associated Press from Nairobi, Kenya.

Turner said a lawyer hired by the ICDAA to represent Erlinder was not allowed to see him on Saturday. She that said if convicted, Erlinder could face up to 20 years in prison.

A Rwandan police spokesman said Erlinder "has been publicly saying that there was no genocide in Rwanda," since he arrived in the country earlier this week.

Erlinder's arrest also drew criticism from the U.S. National Lawyers Guild, who said the Rwandan government was trying to hamstring the legal defense of Victoire Ingabire, an opposition leader running against President Paul Kagame in Aug. 9 elections.

Erlinder is the president of an association of defense lawyers at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda that is trying the masterminds of the 1994 genocide. He is also a law professor at William Mitchell College of Law in St. Paul, Minnesota. His friends and associates say he has visited Rwanda, a tiny Central African country, several times.

Rwanda's 1994 genocide claimed the lives of more than 500,000 people, mostly Tutsis and moderate Hutus. The massacres ended when mostly Tutsi rebels led by Kagame defeated the mostly Hutu extremist perpetrators.

Kagame has been lauded abroad for social and economic reforms and is expected to win another seven-year term, but human rights groups say his administration has an ironclad hold on power and quashes opposing views.

Ingabire, a Hutu, returned to Rwanda in January to contest elections after 16 years of living abroad. She says she returned to Rwanda because the country needs an open discussion to promote reconciliation.

She was arrested and freed on bail but her passport was seized and she cannot leave Kigali. If convicted, Ingabire, 41, could be sentenced to more than two decades in prison.

Her case has become a test of where Rwanda stands in its effort to move past the genocide -- and how much freedom the government will allow.

The U.S. State Department said in a March report on Rwanda that citizens' rights to change their government are "effectively restricted" and cited limits on freedoms of speech, press and judicial independence.