For the first time, an appeal on the responsibility of the French authorities in the genocide in Rwanda is in the hands of administrative justice. The Africa XXI site revealed this on October 11: in April 2023, victims of the genocide and two associations filed an appeal before the Paris administrative court.
Until now the civil parties had turned to criminal justice and the last case which implicated the soldiers of Operation Turquoise in the Bisesero massacre had resulted in a dismissal of the case. This time, it is the French state which is targeted for its supposed failings before, during and after the genocide of the Tutsis, which cost the lives of more than a million people. In this request before the administrative court, the services of the French State are targeted as a system, in a certain number of facts which the civil parties consider to be tainted by illegalities, capable of constituting, according to them, “misconduct ‘appreciation’ and ‘gross service faults’. The fact, for example, that France did not denounce the military assistance agreement with the Hutu power when it became genocidal. Errors which, according to Philippe Raphaà «l, the representative of the applicants, allowed the Bisesero massacre. “A summary of the entire French intervention” “Bisesero,” he said, “it’s a summary of the entire French intervention. Obviously, at the highest level of the general staff, we considered that basically the genocide was secondary, compared to a reading which is a reading of the type “it is a conflict between Rwanda and Uganda via the RPF, the Rwandan Patriotic Front, which would only be the proxy for Ugandan power. And that constitutes a manifest error of assessment. And this obvious error of assessment is seminal because it will lead to serious, continuous and systematic service errors.  » The administrative court must receive the defense briefs from the opposing party, namely, the General Secretariat of the Government. Despite the depth of the files, the civil parties hope for more diligence from the administrative judge than from the judicial judge. And are ready to go to the Council of State.
