Dafroza Gauthier, who spent thirty years tracking Rwandan genocidaires hiding in France, has died at 72

Dafroza Mukarumongi Gauthier died on Saturday, October 3, 2026, in Reims, in northeastern France, at the age of 72. Her husband, Alain Gauthier, confirmed her death to AFP the following day. A Franco-Rwandan, she had dedicated three decades to bringing people suspected of participating in the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi before the French justice system.

A survivor turned investigator

Born in 1954 in southern Rwanda, in Astrida, now Butare, and a chemical engineer by training, Dafroza Gauthier lost her mother and a large part of her maternal family in the 1994 massacres. Her father had already been killed during the killings of 1963. With Alain Gauthier, a teacher she met in Rwanda in the 1970s, she began collecting testimonies from survivors, village by village, as early as 1996.

The couple formalized this work in November 2001 by creating the Collective of Civil Parties for Rwanda (CPCR). Its principle was simple and formidably demanding: to build cases solid enough that the French justice system could no longer look away from suspects who had been living on its territory, sometimes for decades.

Seven final convictions

The CPCR is behind some thirty complaints filed in France. Seven men implicated in the genocide against the Tutsi have been definitively convicted by the French justice system, according to the count cited by several media outlets at the time of her death. The first trial, that of former captain Pascal Simbikangwa, was held in February 2014, twenty years after the events. Others followed, up to that of doctor Eugène Rwamucyo, who was sentenced to 27 years in prison in October 2024.

This work was carried out with meager resources, largely on a volunteer basis, and against a judicial slowness that the couple never ceased to denounce. In November 2017, Rwandan President Paul Kagame awarded her the National Order of Exceptional Friendship.

The legacy of this fight

The passing of Dafroza Gauthier comes as several cases remain open and some suspects have never been tried. The Rwandan government praised her commitment, according to the daily newspaper The New Times.

Her journey says something about the African diaspora: citizens settled far from the continent who, without an official mandate or state resources, compel the institutions of their host country to apply their own laws. The fight against impunity was not played out only in Arusha or Kigali; it was also waged from a house in Reims, file after file.