Subversion has a feature that it does not expose svn:log property if the user does not have permissions to see *all* paths affected by a commit.
When RB attempts to fetch a list of recent commits on trunk/branch and encounters such commit, it displays an "HTTP 500 INTERNAL SERVER ERROR" message instead of any commits - with a traceback pointing to a KeyError while dereferencing commit['message'].
An obvious stop-gap fix would be to replace commit['message'] in get_commits() in scmtools/svn/__init__.py with commit.get('message', '** log message cannot be retrieved **').
With that fix, the list of commits is displayed successfully. However, an attempt to create a review request based on such partially visible commit creates a request without any diff - not even including the visible paths.