Dutch lawyers representing two Rwandan men accused of involvement in the central African country's 1994 genocide launched an urgent bid Friday to stop their clients from being extradited to Kigali.
Dutch courts have previously ruled that Jean Claude Iyamuremye, 39, and Jean-Baptiste Mugimba, around 56, should be returned to Rwanda to face a raft of charges including genocide and crimes against humanity.
The two are suspected Hutu militiamen wanted for their roles in the preparation and mass murder of Tutsis during three months of slaughter after April 1994 in which the UN says some 800,000 people died.
Both deny involvement in the genocide and claim the process against them is politically motivated.
"The... justice system in Rwanda is incapable of giving a fair trial to someone accused of genocide," Iyamuremye's lawyer Bart Stapert told The Hague District Court.
"In fact, he fears for good reason that his life will be in danger should he be sent back to Rwanda," he added.
Iyamuremye is particularly wanted in connection with a mass murder at a school outside Kigali on April 11, 1994, court papers said.
Some 2,000 Tutsi victims were massacred that day near the ETO school, on the outskirts of the Rwandan capital, after UN peacekeepers withdrew from the area, according to the Kigali Memorial Centre's website.
Rwanda requested his extradition in September 2013 and three months later a Dutch judge approved it.
- Decision within 2 weeks -
Mugimba, who was arrested in the Netherlands in January 2014, is suspected of attacking Tutsis in his Kigali neighbourhood.
Six months later, a Dutch court ruled that he too could be sent to Kigali.
Rwanda's bloodshed was sparked when a plane carrying the country's then-president Juvenal Habyarimana, a Hutu, was shot down on April 6, 1994.
His death was blamed on Rwanda's minority Tutsi population, and over the next three months, hundreds of thousands died in an orgy of violence.
Dutch courts can try foreign suspects for genocide if the act was committed after October 1970, following a change in the law to broaden the possibilities for prosecution for the most serious of all crimes.
In the first conviction of its kind, Rwandan-born Dutch citizen Yvonne Basebya was jailed in March 2013 for six years for inciting genocide during the 1994 massacres.
A decision in The Hague is usually rendered within two weeks, a Dutch legal expert said.