Rwandan President Paul Kagame has issued a decree to release up to 40,000 inmates, including thousands of genocide suspects, a senior government official said today.
The move has enraged survivors of the mass killings which claimed the lives of nearly one million people.
The decree, which does not cover key figures behind the Rwanda genocide, will be implemented in a month's time, and is meant to reduce the number of prisoners held in jails but not to forgive them of their crimes.
An estimated 800,000 Rwandans were massacred in the space of three months in 1994 when extremists of the Hutu majority incited a hate campaign that led to the mass murder of minority Tutsis and Hutu moderates.
More than eight years on, Rwanda's prisons are overflowing with more than 100,000 genocide suspects still awaiting trial, and the legal system is unable to cope.
Some of those to be freed are minors who were aged between 14-18 years at the time of committing murders or rapes, while some were accused of committing other crimes.
Rwanda launched a unique mass justice system where genocide suspects are tried before dozens of traditional village courts known as gacaca.
Under gacaca, those suspected of murdering or inciting genocide are taken to the villages where their crimes were allegedly committed, tried by people who witnessed the crimes and judged by a panel of locally elected judges. The gacaca law reduces punishment for those who confess to the crimes, enabling them to serve half of their prison terms in jail and the other half doing communal field work.
Organisations representing survivors of the genocide responded with anger to the proposed release of the suspects.
"How do you expect gacaca to move on smoothly if all these people are let free?," Mr Ngarambe Francois Xavier, president of Ibuka, an umbrella organisation for genocide survivors said.
"They will intimidate survivors into silence. They will threaten them. I don't think it provides good air for gacaca."