[JURIST] UN Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide Juan Mendez [official profile] said Friday that the international community remains reluctant to contribute the funds and military personnel necessary to stop genocide worldwide, as he spoke at a press conference on the 12th anniversary of the genocide in Rwanda [JURIST news archive], during which some 800,000 Rwandans - mostly Tutsis - were killed over 100 days. Mendez said the ongoing conflict in Sudan's Darfur [JURIST news archive] region provides just one example of the world's lack of commitment, likening the situation there to that in Rwanda in 1994.

In a related development Friday, Belgian Minister of Development Cooperation Armand De Decker [official profile] asked the country's parliament to consider enacting a law that would prohibit citizens from denying the Rwandan genocide, perhaps modeling the new initiative after a 1995 Belgian law that prohibited citizens from denying the occurrence of the Holocaust. Rwanda is a former Belgian colony. AP has more. Reuters has additional coverage.