In May 2009 Human Rights Watch (HRW) described The New Times as a state-owned newspaper in a rebuttal to an editorial article that accused HRW of sanitizing people who were attempting to negate the 1994 genocide in Rwanda.
In May 2009, Human Rights Watch (HRW) defended their work by asserting that The New Times is a state-owned newspaper and responding to accusations that they were minimizing the 1994 Rwandan genocide.