Neela Ghoshal talks about the challenges facing the Police Nationale du Burundi, including human-rights abuses committed by certain units within the police. These problems were linked to the integration of military personnel and former rebels into the police as part of a peace process without adequate supplemental training. Ghoshal lays out the recourses for those with human-rights or other complaints against the police and describes the existing accountability structures within the police. She talks about attempts at depoliticization, noting that officials tried to include commanders with different backgrounds in the various command structures within the police. The move was an effort to avoid creating chains of command where all the links come from either the same rebel group or the army. She also talks about the difficulty of running human-rights training programs and the challenges of monitoring these programs' effects.
Full Interview
At the time of this interview, Neela Ghoshal was a researcher at Human Rights Watch in Burundi. She earned a bachelor's degree from the University of Michigan and a master's in international relations from Yale University, both in the U.S. She previously worked at the Bronx Defenders in New York. She participated in this interview in her personal capacity and not as a representative of Human Rights Watch.