From the international campaign for Paul Rusesabagina’s release to Pegasus surveillance, battles over Visit Rwanda sponsorships and a $20,000 technology prize in Washington, Carine Kanimba’s activism has moved far beyond the case that first pushed her onto the world stage.
The win in Washington
On September 25, 2026, inside the Washington headquarters of the National Endowment for Democracy, Carine Kanimba stood at the newest frontier of a campaign that had begun with a family emergency.
Her team had just won first place at AI Hack for Freedom III. The prize was $20,000, paid on site in Bitcoin, for a platform called Behind the Jersey—a searchable project that traces the sponsors of sports clubs to their ultimate owners and flags links to governments or entities accused of serious human-rights abuses.
The scene contained an unlikely collection of the forces that had reshaped her life: political advocacy, digital technology, international institutions and football. The official NED announcement identified her as Rwanda’s representative and the secretary general of the World Liberty Congress. The Human Rights Foundation’s account said six judges selected three finalists from 10 teams after evaluating the importance of the problem, the quality of the solution and its potential impact.
Six years earlier, none of this was at the center of Kanimba’s working life. She had a job in finance in New York. She had studied human rights, spoken publicly about surviving Rwanda’s 1994 genocide and learned the law, but she was not yet living as a full-time international campaigner.
Then her father disappeared.
Before the activist
Kanimba was born in Kigali in 1993. She was still a baby when her biological parents were killed during the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi. She and her sister Anaïse survived and were raised by their aunt and uncle, Taciana and Paul Rusesabagina, as their daughters.
Kanimba has described learning the full truth gradually. In a 2021 reflection published by Fay School, where she studied as a teenager, she said speaking about the loss of her parents helped her connect with other people who had experienced adoption, bereavement or trauma. The school’s account says that in 2009 she used a student speech contest to tell her story publicly for the first time.
JUSTICE & HUMAN RIGHTS
Carine Kanimba: The Daughter Who Turned A Family Crisis Into Activism
Sep 27, 2026
Sep 28, 2026
22 min read
Published
Updated:
From the international campaign for Paul Rusesabagina’s release to Pegasus surveillance, battles over Visit Rwanda sponsorships and a $20,000 technology prize in Washington, Carine Kanimba’s activism has moved far beyond the case that first pushed her onto the world stage.
The win in Washington
On September 25, 2026, inside the Washington headquarters of the National Endowment for Democracy, Carine Kanimba stood at the newest frontier of a campaign that had begun with a family emergency.
Her team had just won first place at AI Hack for Freedom III. The prize was $20,000, paid on site in Bitcoin, for a platform called Behind the Jersey—a searchable project that traces the sponsors of sports clubs to their ultimate owners and flags links to governments or entities accused of serious human-rights abuses.
The scene contained an unlikely collection of the forces that had reshaped her life: political advocacy, digital technology, international institutions and football. The official NED announcement identified her as Rwanda’s representative and the secretary general of the World Liberty Congress. The Human Rights Foundation’s account said six judges selected three finalists from 10 teams after evaluating the importance of the problem, the quality of the solution and its potential impact.
Six years earlier, none of this was at the center of Kanimba’s working life. She had a job in finance in New York. She had studied human rights, spoken publicly about surviving Rwanda’s 1994 genocide and learned the law, but she was not yet living as a full-time international campaigner.
Then her father disappeared.
Before the activist
Kanimba was born in Kigali in 1993. She was still a baby when her biological parents were killed during the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi. She and her sister Anaïse survived and were raised by their aunt and uncle, Taciana and Paul Rusesabagina, as their daughters.
Kanimba has described learning the full truth gradually. In a 2021 reflection published by Fay School, where she studied as a teenager, she said speaking about the loss of her parents helped her connect with other people who had experienced adoption, bereavement or trauma. The school’s account says that in 2009 she used a student speech contest to tell her story publicly for the first time.
The Rusesabagina family moved to Belgium after the genocide. Kanimba later studied in the United States, graduating from Northwestern University. A Northwestern profile written before her father’s detention recorded that she coordinated events for the African Students Association and served as speakers co-chair for Northwestern Community for Human Rights. That matters because it complicates the simplest version of her transformation: she was not politically blank before 2020. She already had an interest in rights and public storytelling.
What changed was scale and necessity.
According to her 2022 sworn congressional statement, she had been working in finance in New York. An alumni profile later reported that she also earned graduate degrees in business, law and economics in Europe. Her family history was present, but it did not yet dominate every working day.
Her relationship with Paul Rusesabagina was not only symbolic. He was the parent who raised her after the genocide. His actions at Kigali’s Hôtel des Mille Collines in 1994 inspired the film Hotel Rwanda and earned him the U.S. Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2005. In later years, however, he also became a prominent critic of President Paul Kagame’s government and a leader of the Rwanda Movement for Democratic Change, known as the MRCD.
That political role would become central to the case against him.
The flight that changed the family
In late August 2020, Rusesabagina left his home in the United States and travelled to Dubai. Court filings and later reporting say he believed a private flight arranged through a Burundian pastor would take him to Burundi. Instead, the aircraft landed in Kigali.
The descriptions of what happened next remain sharply contested.
His family described the operation as a kidnapping or unlawful rendition. Rwanda initially said he had been arrested through international cooperation. Rwanda’s then justice minister, Johnston Busingye, later acknowledged that the government had paid for the private aircraft that took Rusesabagina to Kigali, while maintaining that bringing him to Rwanda was lawful. President Kagame described the operation as “wonderful” and suggested that Rusesabagina had brought himself there by trusting the wrong people.
Independent institutions rejected the idea that the transfer complied with ordinary extradition safeguards. The UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention found that his deprivation of liberty was arbitrary and that his transfer involved an enforced disappearance. The European Parliament called for an international investigation and raised concerns about access to counsel and fair-trial rights.
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Rwanda’s case was not built only around Rusesabagina’s criticism of the government. Prosecutors accused him of supporting the National Liberation Front, or FLN, the armed wing associated with the MRCD, and connected him to attacks in southern Rwanda in 2018 that killed civilians. Rusesabagina acknowledged a leadership role in the political coalition but denied responsibility for the FLN’s violence. Rwanda insisted the proceedings concerned accountability for victims of armed attacks, not the punishment of political speech.
On September 20, 2021, the High Court’s Chamber for International and Cross-Border Crimes convicted him on terrorism-related charges and sentenced him to 25 years in prison. Human Rights Watch and independent trial observers described serious due-process failures; the Rwandan government defended the verdict and the independence of its judiciary.
For Kanimba, the legal argument was also brutally personal. A man who had left Texas was suddenly appearing in handcuffs on television in Kigali.
A daughter builds a campaign
Kanimba did not become the campaign alone. Her mother, siblings, lawyers, members of Congress, European lawmakers, journalists and human-rights organizations all became part of it. But the public record shows that she became one of its most visible messengers.
She moved much of her life to Brussels, where the family’s Belgian citizenship gave the case an institutional route into European politics. She and her siblings contacted the U.S. State Department and Belgian authorities, worked with lawyers and rights groups, spoke repeatedly to international media and pressed elected officials to treat the detention as a diplomatic case—not merely a criminal proceeding inside Rwanda.
The campaign produced a sequence of public pressure points:
In December 2020, dozens of U.S. lawmakers called on Kagame to return Rusesabagina safely.
On February 11, 2021, the European Parliament adopted a resolution by 659 votes to one, calling for scrutiny of the transfer and trial.
After his conviction, the Parliament passed another resolution on October 7, 2021, seeking humanitarian release and repatriation.
In May 2022, the U.S. State Department determined that Rusesabagina was wrongfully detained.
On June 21, 2022, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a bipartisan resolution calling for his release. Congressman Joaquin Castro’s office described the vote as an overwhelming bipartisan action.
On July 27, 2022, Kanimba testified before the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence about both her father’s detention and the Pegasus infection of her phone.
On August 11, 2022, Secretary of State Antony Blinken raised the case publicly in Kigali alongside Rwandan Foreign Minister Vincent Biruta.
On August 30, 2022, Kanimba appeared before the European Parliament’s PEGA committee at a hearing on spyware victims and remedies.
This is what the campaign looked like in practice: testimony, resolutions, interviews, private calls, meetings with officials and a relentless effort to stop the case from disappearing from public view.
Her strategy was explicit. In an interview with Recorded Future News, Kanimba said her goal was to make the political cost of keeping her father in prison greater than the cost of releasing him.
Did the campaign help free him?
The evidence supports a careful answer: the family campaign helped create and sustain international pressure, but the release was the product of a broader diplomatic process and a formal decision by Rwanda.
Public advocacy kept Rusesabagina’s health, trial and detention before lawmakers and the media. It helped produce congressional and European resolutions and gave officials political reasons to keep raising the case. Kanimba’s work was part of that pressure.
On March 24, 2023, Rwanda commuted Rusesabagina’s sentence after what U.S. officials described as intensive diplomacy. President Joe Biden thanked Rwanda and Qatar, and his official statement also credited U.S. officials who worked with Kigali. Qatar facilitated the process.
Rusesabagina had submitted a clemency request to Kagame, and Rwanda made the legal decision to commute his sentence.
Rwanda’s Justice Ministry statement stressed that commutation did not erase the conviction and that the remaining sentence could be reactivated if similar offences were repeated. The government said clemency followed presidential approval and consideration of requests from Rusesabagina and others convicted in the case.
The distinctions are important:
Public advocacy raised the cost of inaction and kept the case visible.
Private diplomacy involved the United States, Qatar and Rwanda.
The formal legal act was Rwanda’s presidential commutation.
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When the campaigner became the surveillance story
While Kanimba was contacting officials about her father, researchers found that at least one of her phones had been repeatedly compromised with Pegasus, the powerful spyware made by Israel’s NSO Group.
This is the most technically established part of the surveillance story. Amnesty International’s forensic appendix published device traces from November 2020 through June 2021, including evidence associated with zero-click attack attempts. A Citizen Lab memorandum entered into the U.S. congressional record concluded that at least one device was infected in 23 approximate periods between September 2020 and April 2021. Citizen Lab explained that a successful Pegasus infection can expose messages, files, passwords, microphones, cameras and location information.
What the forensic work did not establish on its own was the identity of the operator.
Kanimba believes Rwanda was responsible and told Congress she had no doubt about that conclusion. The Pegasus Project, coordinated by Forbidden Stories with Amnesty’s technical support, linked the wider pattern of target selection to a suspected Rwandan client.
Rwanda has denied possessing or using Pegasus and called the allegations a disinformation campaign. NSO Group has said it licenses its products only to government agencies for investigations of serious crime and terrorism, does not publicly identify customers and investigates credible allegations of misuse. In a response quoted by Recorded Future News, NSO said it terminates contracts when illegal use is found.
For Kanimba, the distinction did not reduce the impact. The knowledge that a phone could become a listening device altered how she understood safety, advocacy and the reach of commercial surveillance. Her role expanded: she was no longer speaking only about one prisoner but also about a technology industry capable of exposing activists, families and the government officials who communicate with them.
Her father came home. The activism stayed.
Rusesabagina’s release removed the emergency that had consumed the family. It did not return Kanimba to her old life.
In a June 2023 CNN interview, she connected her family’s experience to the wider use of arbitrary detention and hostage-taking against dissidents. She argued that people in safer positions had a responsibility to speak for those being silenced.
Her institutional role widened. She served as a spokesperson for the World Liberty Congress during its 2023–2025 leadership period and is now listed on the organization’s current governance page as its general secretary for the 2025–2027 term. The network brings together democracy activists from countries governed by authoritarian or highly repressive systems. She also became a 2024–2025 Obama Foundation Europe Leader.
The transition was from one name—Paul Rusesabagina—to a portfolio of issues: political prisoners, transnational repression, commercial spyware, sanctions, democratic organizing and, increasingly, the use of sport to build state reputation.
The Visit Rwanda battle
Kanimba describes Rwanda’s football sponsorships as “sportswashing”: the use of sport’s popularity and prestige to soften international perceptions of a government’s record.
Kanimba has used speeches, interviews and fan-facing campaigns to press clubs to examine who benefits from these agreements. At Play the Game 2025, she argued that football sponsorship can reduce pressure for internal reform by purchasing prestige abroad. In 2026, she appeared in a documentary-style Play the Game podcast examining the politics behind Visit Rwanda.
Can her campaign claim measurable victories? Only with caution. Arsenal ended its partnership in 2026, and Bayern reduced its commercial branding in 2025 after public criticism. multiple pressures were operating at once: fan protests, scrutiny of Rwanda’s human-rights record, the conflict in eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo, commercial strategy and the clubs’ changing sponsorship portfolios. It is defensible to say her advocacy contributed to the debate.
Behind the Jersey: a promising tool under construction
Behind the Jersey turns that dispute into a system. As of September 27, 2026, the public site said it had rated 116 clubs across 12 mapped leagues, using data last updated September 25.
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The workflow is unusually transparent for a political-accountability prototype. AI agents collect current shirt sponsors, trace ownership and locate human-rights reporting. A person then checks each claim and source before publication. The project’s public GitHub repository contains the data, methodology, ownership chains, citations and change history. Its evidence rules say more serious ratings require two independent sources.
Fans can search for a club or sponsor, inspect the linked evidence, find club contact details and use the information to organize or advocate. The project currently covers major football leagues and includes examples involving Rwanda, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Russia.
Its labels—“Clean,” “Spotted,” “Stained” and “Soaked”—are memorable, but also moral judgments. The site says ratings are illustrative until the method is final. It is not yet clear whether governments, sponsors or clubs have a formal right of reply beyond contributing corrections through the open repository. The method traces evidence to owners, but complex ownership structures and state-linked companies can produce difficult questions about how far responsibility should travel. A public corrections policy, appeals channel, contributor disclosure rules and a clear privacy policy would strengthen the project.
The safest description of its current status is therefore: public, functional and open-source, but still a newly launched prototype with an evolving rating methodology.
The $20,000 victory
AI Hack for Freedom III took place on September 24 and 25, 2026, at NED headquarters in Washington. Ten activists representing Colombia, Kenya, Nepal, North Macedonia, Rwanda, Tibet, Turkey, Ukraine, Venezuela and Zimbabwe led teams of developers and designers. Six judges came from technology, diplomacy, academia and human-rights organizations.
The total prize pool was $50,000. Behind the Jersey won first place and $20,000 in Bitcoin; second place and $10,000 went to Kadir Yağız Çetin’s offline education platform for Afghan girls; third place and $6,000 went to Chemi Lhamo’s tool for preserving evidence when a protester’s phone is seized or destroyed. The remaining teams received $2,000 each.
NED described Behind the Jersey as a centralized platform that helps fans identify authoritarian entities financing their teams and organize advocacy. HRF emphasized the combination of AI-assisted research and human fact-checking.
From one family to a larger campaign
Kanimba’s public life can be read as a sequence of enlarging circles.
The first circle was family: a daughter trying to find, protect and free her father.
The second was diplomatic: lawmakers, ministries, rights groups and governments mobilized around a detention case.
The third was technological: the discovery that the campaigner’s own phone had become a surveillance target.
The fourth was institutional: a continuing role in an international network of democracy activists after her father came home.
The newest circle is cultural and commercial. Behind the Jersey asks sports fans to see a shirt sponsor not as background decoration but as an entry point into questions of ownership, state power and human rights.
Timeline: Carine Kanimba’s path into international activism
Date | Development |
1993 | Kanimba is born in Kigali. |
1994 | Her biological parents are killed during the genocide against the Tutsi; Paul and Taciana Rusesabagina raise Carine and Anaïse as their daughters. |
2009 | At Fay School, she publicly tells her personal story in a student speech contest. |
Before 2020 | She completes her studies at Northwestern University and European graduate programmes after campus involvement in African student life and human-rights programming, then works in finance in New York. |
August 2020 | Paul Rusesabagina travels from the United States through Dubai and is transported by private aircraft to Kigali. Kanimba and her family begin an international campaign. |
February 11, 2021 | The European Parliament condemns the transfer and detention and calls for an international investigation. |
July 2021 | The Pegasus Project publicly reports forensic evidence that Kanimba’s phone was infected with NSO Group spyware. |
September 20, 2021 | A Rwandan court convicts Rusesabagina on terrorism-related charges and sentences him to 25 years. |
October 7, 2021 | The European Parliament calls for his humanitarian release and repatriation. |
May 2022 | The U.S. State Department designates Rusesabagina as wrongfully detained. |
June 21, 2022 | The U.S. House passes a bipartisan resolution seeking his release. |
July 27, 2022 | Kanimba testifies before the House Intelligence Committee about Pegasus and her father’s detention. |
August 30, 2022 | She appears at the European Parliament’s hearing on spyware victims and remedies. |
March 24, 2023 | Rwanda commutes Rusesabagina’s sentence after U.S.–Rwanda diplomacy facilitated by Qatar. |
2023–2025 | Kanimba serves as a World Liberty Congress spokesperson and expands her advocacy beyond her father’s case. |
October 2025 | She addresses Visit Rwanda and sportswashing at Play the Game 2025. |
2025–2027 term | She becomes general secretary of the World Liberty Congress. |
September 24–25, 2026 | Her team builds Behind the Jersey at AI Hack for Freedom III and wins first place and $20,000 in Bitcoin. |
Primary and institutional sources
National Endowment for Democracy — AI Hack for Freedom III winners
Human Rights Foundation — AI Hack for Freedom III winners and judging details
U.S. House Intelligence Committee — Kanimba statement, transcript and Citizen Lab memorandum
UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention — Opinion No. 81/2021
Rwanda Development Board — response on international sports partnerships
Independent reporting and background
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