STRASBOURG The European Union should shift its aid policy toward Rwanda to give priority to setting up a proper legal system, the EU's humanitarian aid chief said on Wednesday.

"The legal problem is the most explosive one," Commissioner Emma Bonino, who returned from a visit to Rwanda, Burundi and Zaire on Tuesday, told a news conference. "There is absolutely no state of law."

She said only six judges were left in Rwanda, and some two million refugees were reluctant to return home because there was no system for resolving disputes over land.

"The people in the refugee camps are going to stay there and the arrogants are going to go on playing their own game," she said.

Bonino said Rwanda desperately needed independent legal authorities to review 23,000 files of prisoners, among other things.

Up to one million members of the Tutsi minority and their Hutu allies were slaughtered in Rwanda by Hutu troops and militiamen between April and July last year.

Bonino said the International Court of Justice would be an indispensable tool in investigating the genocide, but it lacked money to do the job properly.

She said a Kigali prison she visited was extremely overcrowded, the country was still suffering from food shortages and refugee camps were like "Dante's inferno".

She said she knew her proposal to aid Rwanda's legal system would be controversial because it would be expensive, but she said she was confident the full European Commission would support her.

She said Burundi, which neighbours Rwanda, was also in a "state of absolute and total fragility."

"I've come to the conclusion not even a minimal amount of stability exists in this country at this time," she said.

The assassination last weekend of a government minister from the majority Hutu tribe sparked fears of fresh conflict in the central African state which has been under dusk to dawn curfew since ethnic clashes in December.