Dutch court sentences Rwandan man to life for 1994 genocide role

A Dutch court has sentenced a Rwandan man to life in prison for his role in the murder of thousands during the 1994 genocide in the Central African country.

The Hague district court found Eugene N guilty of war crimes and genocide on Friday, and issued the sentence.

Judges called his conduct a “significant lack of respect for human dignitiy and for human life,” and said that only a life sentence would serve justice “to the immense suffering that has been inflicted on the victims and the bereaved families”.

Named only as Eugene N, the suspect helped ransack and burn homes in two mostly Tutsi communities, before taking part in a mob that descended on roughly 3,000 Tutsis sheltering in a stadium in Mbazi in April of 1994.

He directed the Hutu attackers to let no one escape and threw a grenade into the crowd, the court said. Survivors of the initial attack were later beaten and hacked to death.

Eugene N, variously reported to be 66 or 67 years old, fled the Netherlands in 1998 and later became a Dutch citizen. Rwanda sought his extradition in 2014, but the Netherlands’ law shields nationals from being handed over.

Prosecutors opened their case in 2020, questioning more than 30 witnesses before arresting him in 2024.

Eugene N denied his involvement, his defence portraying him as having tried to stop the violence and lost dozens of relatives himself. His representatives called him “a broken man”.

Prosectutors countered, “If the horrific crimes of the suspect … do not deserve a life sentence, then what does?”

Rwanda’s 1994 genocide killed more 800,000 people, mostly Tutsis, in roughly three months of violence directed by Hutu ethnonationalist leaders.

A United Nations tribunal prosecuted leading organisers, but European courts have since pursued lower-level suspects under universal jurisdiction, which allows atrocities and war crimes to be prosecuted regardless of where they occurred.