Our Statement on the Assassination of Charles Ingabire, Editor of Inyenyeri News

On the evening of 30 November 2011, Charles Ingabire, a Rwandan journalist and the editor of Inyenyeri News, an online publication that reported critically on the Kigali regime, was shot dead at close range near a bar in the Bukesa-Kibuye area of Kampala, Uganda. He was thirty-one years old. His killers fled on a motorcycle and have never been brought to justice. ## A journalist who warned that they would come for him Charles had fled Rwanda after his reporting made him a target at home, and he had already survived an earlier beating in Uganda. He told friends, colleagues and fellow exiles that he had been followed and threatened, and that the threats came from people acting in the interest of the Rwandan authorities. His reporting on Inyenyeri News documented corruption, military excess and the suppression of dissent, the very subjects the regime works hardest to bury. The message of his murder was not lost on the thousands of Rwandan exiles in Uganda, Kenya, South Africa, Europe and North America: even after you flee, you are not safe. No one has ever been arrested for Charles's killing. More than a decade later, the investigation has gone nowhere, and the pattern it inaugurated has only grown. Rwanda's critics in exile have since been kidnapped, beaten, discredited and killed, from the attempt on René Mugenzi and Jonathan Musonera in London, to the assassination of Patrick Karegeya in Johannesburg, to the deaths of Kizito Mihigo and John Williams Ntwali at home. ## Our demands - The Government of Uganda must reopen and properly resource the investigation into Charles Ingabire's murder, identify and prosecute his killers, and tell his family the truth it has been denied for over a decade.

• Every state hosting Rwandan refugees and journalists must treat threats against them as a matter of national security and international obligation, and provide genuine protection.
• The UN human rights system and press freedom bodies must document and denounce the assassinations of exiled Rwandan journalists as part of a systematic campaign of transnational repression.
• Kigali must stop denying responsibility for a pattern it benefits from, and allow independent international investigation of every case raised. Charles Ingabire kept publishing when it would have been far safer to stay quiet. His murder was meant to silence the reporting he began. The Global Campaign for Rwandans' Human Rights will continue to demand justice for him, and to stand with every Rwandan journalist who refuses to be intimidated.