[JURIST] The International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) [official website; JURIST news archive] Wednesday reduced the sentences [press release, in French] of three Rwandan media executives imprisoned for their roles in the 1994 Rwandan genocide [BBC backgrounder]. Ferdinand Nahimana and Hassan Ngeze, sentenced to life in prison [JURIST report] in 2003, were granted sentence reductions to 30 years and 35 years, respectively. The third executive, Jean-Bosco Barayagwiza, had his sentence reduced from 35 years to 32 years.

Nahimana and Barayagwiza helped establish Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines [Wikipedia backgrounder], a radio station that broadcast messages encouraging the killing of minority Tutsis; Ngeze was the editor of Kangura [IDRC backgrounder], a magazine that "dehumanized" Tutsis. The five-judge appeals tribunal overturned the trial judge's finding that there was an understanding between the defendants' media outlets to encourage genocide. Approximately 800,000 people, primarily Tutsis, died in three months of the Rwandan genocide. BBC News has more.