Human Rights Watch report: Rwandan forces and M23 forcibly recruited and detained thousands in eastern Congo

Human Rights Watch said in a report released Wednesday that Rwandan forces and the M23 armed group forcibly recruited and abusively detained thousands of people in eastern Congo, including children, at two camps in North Kivu, in abuses the rights group said may amount to war crimes and possible crimes against humanity.

The 78-page report, titled “Death Was Everywhere: Arbitrary Detention, Killings, and Forced Recruitment by the M23 and the Rwanda Defence Force,” focuses on abuses in North and South Kivu between mid-2024 and December 2025, with particular attention to the Rumangabo and Tshanzu training camps in North Kivu. Human Rights Watch said it interviewed 102 former detainees who escaped the camps, were later deployed with M23, or surrendered to the Congolese army. It also cited witnesses and U.N., military, intelligence, media and diplomatic sources, as well as verified geolocated videos and photographs, satellite imagery and 3D reconstruction.

According to Human Rights Watch, M23 fighters backed by Rwandan military personnel rounded up Congolese soldiers, Wazalendo militia fighters allied with national forces, police officers and civilians, sometimes by force and sometimes through coercion or deception. The group said people were seized at checkpoints and ambushes, and also taken from hospitals, churches and schools, or summoned under threats or false pretenses before being transported to the camps.

At the camps, former detainees told Human Rights Watch they were subjected to murder, torture, corporal punishment, forced labor and the use of child soldiers. The group said children as young as 12 were recruited. Detainees described severe shortages of food, water, medicine and health care, and said people who tried to escape or broke camp rules were sometimes summarily executed. One former detainee quoted in the report said, “If we were caught trying to drink from puddles on the ground, the guards beat us violently.”

Human Rights Watch said former detainees indicated that hundreds of people, perhaps more, died in the camps in 2025 from harsh conditions, beatings and executions. It said a precise death toll would require locating and excavating mass graves. Another former detainee quoted by the group said: “I was just a student, I had never seen a dead body before. They made me bury bodies seven times, we put them in a big grave.”

“The Rwandan-backed M23 is running so-called training camps in eastern Congo, where recruits have suffered abuse and torture, at times with deadly consequences,” Clémentine de Montjoye, senior Great Lakes researcher at Human Rights Watch, said in the organization’s June 10 release.

Human Rights Watch said former detainees identified Rwandan soldiers among those involved in the roundups and in camp training and command, citing uniforms, equipment, accents and language. The group said military, intelligence and U.N. sources also confirmed Rwandan involvement. Human Rights Watch argues that Rwanda’s role shows effective control over the area and meets the legal threshold for belligerent occupation under international humanitarian law, a legal assessment by the organization rather than a judicial finding. According to Human Rights Watch, the Rwandan government and M23 officials have long denied allegations of abuse.

The report lands amid broader scrutiny of Rwanda’s role in eastern Congo. M23 is a Rwanda-backed armed group active in the region, and prior U.N. and Human Rights Watch reporting had already documented evidence of Rwandan support. The new report adds detailed camp-level testimony and geospatial evidence after major M23 territorial gains. Human Rights Watch has said the group captured Goma in January 2025, and The Associated Press has reported that M23 and Rwandan forces captured Uvira in December 2025. The U.S. Treasury on March 2, 2026, sanctioned the Rwanda Defence Force and four senior Rwandan officials for supporting, training and fighting alongside M23 in eastern Congo.

Human Rights Watch called on the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, the permanent war crimes tribunal in The Hague, to investigate alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity and urged Rwanda’s international partners to review military assistance and consider targeted sanctions. The group also reported abuses by Congolese authorities, saying that during a May 2026 visit to Makala prison in Kinshasa it interviewed 34 detainees, including 14 children, who said Congolese military intelligence had held and interrogated them for several days to a month after they surrendered before transferring them there. Human Rights Watch said it wrote on June 9 to Congo’s justice and defense ministers seeking information about the legal basis for those detentions.