Our Statement on the Assassination of Jean-Léonard Rugambage

Jean-Léonard Rugambage, the deputy editor of the Rwandan newspaper Umuvugizi, was shot dead outside his home in Kigali on the night of 24 June 2010. Hours earlier, he had published an online article, in the paper's banned print edition's online exile edition, linking Rwandan officials to the attempted assassination of former army chief Lieutenant-General Faustin Kayumba Nyamwasa in Johannesburg days before. ## Silenced within hours of publishing Umuvugizi had been Rwanda's most persistent independent voice. Its print edition had just been suspended by the authorities ahead of the August 2010 elections; its editor, Jean-Bosco Mutangana, was in exile, and Rugambage was running the online edition from Kigali. The article he published, the first to name Rwandan suspects in the Johannesburg shooting, appeared only hours before he was killed. Two men were arrested for his murder; one, described in court as an army off-duty soldier, was convicted, and the case was closed without ever examining who ordered the killing or why it came so soon after his article. The lesson was received far beyond Rwanda's borders: reporting on the regime's violence abroad could cost you your life at home. It is the same lesson Charles Ingabire's murder would teach in Uganda a year later. ## Our demands - The Government of Rwanda must allow an independent investigation into who ordered Jean-Léonard Rugambage's assassination, not only who pulled the trigger.

• The 2010 closure of Umuvugizi and the suppression of independent media in the run-up to the elections must be recognised as the coup against press freedom it was.
• Journalists in exile publishing about Rwanda must be treated by host states as targets requiring protection, not as ordinary refugees. Rugambage died hours after telling the truth. The Global Campaign for Rwandans' Human Rights demands justice for him, and will keep publishing what he could not live to publish.