A 43-year-old has been charged with complicity in a genocide in Rwanda, and will be dispatched back to the homeland, the Ministry of Justice decided.
The man came to Norway as a refugee in 1999.
The decision of the Supreme Court was unanimous, and in line with the ruling of the Gulating Court of Appeal in 2014 that all conditions for extradition have been met.
16 years in Norway
The man has stayed legally in Norway for nearly 16 years and has a spouse and three minor children here.
The 43-year-old was arrested in May 2013 and charged with complicity of genocide in his home country in 1994. He was accused of having had a role in the massacres in the areas Nkakwa and Cyahinda, where over 7,000 people were killed in 1994. He denies culpability.
Lawyer Risnes, who is the man’s lawyer, told the Aftonbladet that his client will appeal the ministry’s decision.
A person extradited
Already a similar issue has been raised in the Norwegian legal system. When Rwandan Charles Bandora was extradited to his home country in 2013, it was more than two years and nine months since his arrest in Norway, being wanted by Interpol for participation in the genocide. Here too, the extradition went all the way through to the Supreme Court.
Bandora was sentenced to 30 years in prison in Rwanda’s Supreme Court in 2015 after being found guilty of hundreds of killings during the 1994 genocide.
That same year, Sadi Bugingo, who came to Norway in 2001, was sentenced to 21 years in prison for complicity in genocide of 2,000 people in Rwanda in 1994. It went to trial in Norway because there were no extradition petition that met the requirements of Norwegian law.
Source: NTB scanpix / Norway Today
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