A former Rwandan politician deported from Canada and later convicted of genocide has lost his attempt to make Ottawa intervene over his treatment in a Rwandan prison.

As first reported by the National Post, Federal Court Justice Denis Gascon ruled that Canada has no continuing obligation to monitor the imprisonment of Léon Mugesera, 74, who is serving a life sentence in Rwanda.

“Canada did not and does not have an ongoing obligation to monitor the way the Rwandan authorities have been treating Mr. Mugesera since his removal from Canada,” Gascon wrote.

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Mugesera entered Canada with his family as a permanent resident in 1993. Authorities later discovered he had concealed information on his immigration application, leading to a deportation order in 1996.

Before fleeing Rwanda, Mugesera was an influential politician and university professor. A notorious 1992 speech he delivered was found to have incited violence against the country’s Tutsi minority ahead of the 1994 genocide, in which approximately 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus were murdered.

The Supreme Court of Canada unanimously ruled in 2005 that there were reasonable grounds to believe Mugesera had committed crimes against humanity. After years of appeals and legal challenges, he was deported in 2012. A Rwandan court convicted him of genocide and crimes against humanity in 2016.

Mugesera claimed prison authorities had threatened and humiliated him while denying him proper medical treatment. He and his wife asked the Federal Court to declare that Rwanda had violated diplomatic assurances made before his deportation and that Canada had a duty to intervene.

Gascon rejected the request, finding that Mugesera is a foreign national who was lawfully removed and is no longer protected by the Canadian Charter.

The judge also found insufficient evidence that Mugesera’s detention conditions violated international standards or that Rwanda had broken its assurances to Canada.