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(Courtesy of Human Rights Watch)
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Human Rights Curtailed in Ethiopia
December 9, 1997
New York - (New York, December 9, 1997) Despite
frequent statements about its commitment to the enforcement of
human rights standards in the country, the Ethiopian government's
actual practices, detailed in Ethiopia: The Curtailment of Rights
released by Human Rights Watch today, significantly deviate from
these principles.
The government daily violates the civil and political rights of
Ethiopian citizens by denying them the basic freedoms of speech,
assembly, and association. The practices of arbitrary arrest,
ill-treatment and torture in detention continue under the
Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) which
took power in May 1991 after defeating the Derg military
dictatorship.
Commenting on the announced visit by Secretary of State Madeleine
Albright to Ethiopia today, Peter Takirambudde, the Executive
Director of the Africa Division of Human Rights Watch said
"we are reminding the United States that it is time to
insist that Ethiopia meets its international human rights
obligations. We call on the U.S. government to use its economic
and strategic support for the country to induce and to facilitate
human rights improvements."
With the legacy of the Derg behind it, the EPRDF proclaimed, as
it instituted a four-year transitional period (1991-1995), its
commitment to democratization and respect for the rule of law and
pledged to establish human rights in the country. The
transitional legislature ratified the major international human
rights treaties. The constitution of today's Federal Democratic
Republic of Ethiopia offers detailed basic human rights
guarantees and provides for the incorporation into domestic laws
of all the human rights treaties to which Ethiopia is party. New
laws were enacted that guarantee the respect of human rights and
civil liberties, institute the independence of the judiciary and
the press, and provide for multipartyism and free universal
suffrage, theoretically allowing the convening of competitive
elections for the first time in the country's history.
Upon taking power in 1991, the EPRDF actively promoted a policy
of ethnic federalism that influenced the subsequent
constitutional, political, and administrative restructuring of
the country. At the same time, it moved effectively to dominate
the political system by favoring regional parties affiliated with
it and clamping down on opposition and civil society groups.
The emerging contours of the political scene generated a
particular set of human rights problems. Among the major human
rights concerns: Arbitrary Arrest and Torture: In remote regions,
where government forces sporadically confronted armed dissident
groups pressing for self determination on ethnic grounds, village
shakedowns followed armed encounters or were used to preempt such
encounters. As a result, hundreds of civilians were held in 1996
and 1997 under the authority of regional governments that
suspected them of supporting armed opposition groups. As
documented in Ethiopia: The Curtailment of Rights, this
particular category of detainees faced the greatest risk of
political killings, torture, and harsh and inhumane treatment,
mainly at the hands of members of rural militias and other
security forces that enforce law and order in remote rural areas.
The absence of effective judicial oversight and the restriction
of the work of most rights monitoring groups to the capital has
meant most of those suffering abuse have had no recourse to legal
remedy or to public denunciation. Freedom of Expression: Other
crackdowns severely curtailed the exer cise of civil and
political rights. The government attempted to bring a boisterous
private press in line by the routine use of detention and
imprisonment, and the imposition of prohibitive fines and bail
amounts on journalists and editors.
Freedom of Association: The exercise of constitutionally
guaranteed freedom of association was severely curtailed as
activists loyal to the government targeted the two largest labor
organizations in the country, the Ethiopian's Teachers'
Association (ETA) and the Confederation of Ethiopian Trad e
Unions (CETU), for control. Indicative of the predicament of ETA
was that its president, Dr. Taye Wolde Semayat, started his
second year in prison in May 1997, pending the conclusion of his
trial on charges of heading an armed clandestine anti-government
group. And on May 8, 1997, the police sai d they had shot and
killed his successor at the head of ETA, Assefa Maru.
The police statement claimed that the union official, who was
also an executive committee member of the independent Ethiopian
Human Rights Council, resisted arrest when police caught him
preparing a terrorist act with other accomplices, and charged
that he had replaced Dr. Taye as the leader of the clandestine
armed group. Human Rights Watch interviews with eyewitnesses and
photographic evidence, indicated that Assefa Maru was shot in the
street on the way to his office. According to the testimonies, at
least four police teams took part in the assassination-style
killing. Despite constitutional guarantees of the right to
associate and organize, conflicting policy and administrative
regulations have left non-governmental organizations in confusion
and uncertainty.
Newly founded organizations have found it difficult to register,
some already existing organizations have been deregistered. The
government continued to deny the veteran Ethiopian Human Rights
Council legal status, contending that it was a political
organization. In November 1997, seven Oromo elders and board
members of the newly founded Human Rights League were detained
and charged, in December, with terrorism and stockpiling of arms.
The Ogaden Human Rights Committee, established in 1995, operates
clandestinely and publishes its reports outside the country.
Founded in 1992, the Oromo Ex-Prisoners For Human Rights
similarly continued to function in a perilous clandestinity.
Freedom of Assembly: Under Ethiopian law, organizers of political
meetings and demonstrations are required only to notify the
competent government authorities prior to convening an event. The
government managed, however, to restrict freedom of assembly by
introducing a de facto permit system by virtue of which it
stalled in acknowledging notifications and declared events which
went ahead anyway as illegal, and therefore subject to dispersal
and the arrest of participants. The government required some of
those it arrested for taking part in political meetings and
anti-government demonstrations, such as the 1997 demonstrations
in Addis Ababa by shopkeepers and students, to submit written
statements admitting their participation in an illegal activity,
promising not to repeat the act, and praying for its pardon to be
released. With threats of unspecified punishments hanging over
their heads, the detained demonstrators all submitted to this
humiliating ritual, which in addition implied that they would
forfeit their constitutional right of peaceful assembly.
The Judicial System: In the face of an all-dominant party and
powerful executive branch, victims of abuses had no redress. The
restructuring of the judiciary, which had already suffered
sweeping political purges in the immediate aftermath of the fall
of the Derg, has led to further pressure on its meager
capacities, resulting in its near paralysis. Despite significant
government efforts to reform the judiciary and ease its
bottlenecks, judges who try to uphold the rule of law are
frequently defeated by local officials who refuse to comply. The
Council of Peoples' Representatives initiated preparations in
1996 for the establishment of a human rights commission and
ombudsman institution to fill in some of the gaps in the rights
protection regime. By the end of 1997, no concrete steps in that
direction had as yet been taken. The credibility of the new
police force, which was meant to be established under civilian
control, and made accountable before the law, suffered serious
setbacks following the role of the police in some troubling
political cases, particularly the killing in May 1997 of Assefa
Maru.
T he "Derg Trials": In 1994, Human Rights Watch
published "Reckoning Under the Law," detailing the
process of accountability for officials of the Derg who committed
atrocities. By the third quarter of 1997, the trials on charges
of war crimes and crimes against humanity of the seventy-two
top-ra nking Derg officials, including Col. Mengistu Haile
Mariam, who had fled to Zimbabwe shortly before the fall of Addis
Ababa to the EPRDF, were still pending. As for the majority of
those detained in relation to their suspected role during the
Derg dictatorship, it was only in the first quarter of 1997 that
the Special Prosecutor's Office announced they had been charged
with criminal offences. The Office charged a total of 5,198
people, of whom 2,246 were already in detention, while 2,952 were
charged in absentia. The vast majority of the defendants were
charged with genocide and war crimes , and alternatively charged
with aggravated homicide and wilful injury. Many of the
defendants were in pre-trial detention for almost six years
before they were brought to court.
The Role of the International Community: Ethiopian government
officials frequently made statements that equated the expression
of human rights concerns by representatives of the international
community with interference in the internal affairs of the
country. In any case, Ethiopia's partners in the international
community gave mixed signals. They considered the country a model
of economic reforms, and strategic ally both for the
stabilization of the Horn of Africa region and for the diplomatic
and military containment of perceived threats from the Islamist
government of neighboring Sudan. This led to firm commitments of
aid, and less resolve as to the conditioning of that aid on human
rights improvements and sound governance benchmarks. Five years
into this strategic alliance, concerned representatives of the
international community still had no focal point to which they
could b ring their queries about abuses, and their appeals were
rarely answered.
RECOMMENDATIONS
To the Ethiopian Government Abide by the provisions of the
Constitution of the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia, and
the international human rights instruments to which Ethiopia is
party, in particular the International Covenant on Civil and
Political Rights, taking measures to this effect to:
guarantee the physical and psychological integrity of all
Ethiopians currently in detention, and immediately release those
illegally detained; put an end to the practice of illegal or
arbitrary detention as well as ill-treatment or torture of
detainees and extrajudicial executions; guarantee the
independence of the judiciary as required by the Ethiopian
constitution and international law. Particularly, allocate
sufficient financial resources to the judiciary, ensure the
proper training of judges and others involved in the
administration of justice, and hold police and other officials
who interfere with the independence of the judiciary or refuse to
obey court orders accountable before the law; respect freedom of
association, by immediately lifting all legal and bureaucratic
obstacles hindering the registration of existing and new
nongovernmental organizations; cease the arbitrary detention and
harassment of activists in nonviolent civil organizations. Stop
all unlawful attacks on these organizations in the form of raids
against their offices and projects, confiscation of their
property, and freezing of their bank accounts; respect freedom of
assembly, by lifting restrictions on political meetings and
public demonstrations imposed by law and in practice, and halting
arbitrary police actions to ban and disperse such meetings and
demonstrations; respect freedom of expression, by lifting
arbitrary restrictions on the print and public broadcasting
media; and ceasing the detention and imprisonment of journalists
for the expression of their opinions; respect academic freedom,
by removing all restrictions on faculty and students' rights to
associate and assemble; recognize the rights of Ethiopian human
rights defenders to monitor, investigate, and report on human
rights abuses in the country; and their rights to associate with
others nationally and internationally in pursuit of the promotion
of human rights and their protection in the country.
Establish a civilian, accountable police force, and strengthen
the training of its personnel on issues of due process of law and
on human rights standards and protections. To that effect:
conduct an independent inquiry into the killing of Assefa Maru,
executive committee member of both the Ethiopian Teachers
Association and the Ethiopian Human Rights Council, at the hands
of police officers; investigate all other allegations of police
abuse and improper treatment of detained persons; hold police
officials responsible for such abuses accountable before the law.
Establish a permanent human rights commission which is genuinely
independent of the government, empowering it to:
monitor and report on compliance with the human rights standards
enshrined in the domestic legal system and the international
instruments to which Ethiopia is party; establish its own
priorities, which should include investigating reports of
violations of the right to life and security of the person, and
the right to freedom from torture and arbitrary arrest and
detention; submit findings to judicial bodies so that
perpetrators, including those within the security forces, are
brought to justice; ensure that victims of abuses receive the
adequate remedies that their cases call for, including protection
for witnesses appearing before it and compensation for and
rehabilitation of victims of abuses perpetrated by security
forces.
To the International Community Human Rights Watch urges members
of the international community to press the government of
Ethiopia to implement the above recommendations, in particular by
using their economic support to the country to induce and to
facilitate tangible human rights improvements. In particular:
support efforts by organizations of civil society to promote
human rights standards and monitor government's compliance;
target assistance to the judiciary in order to improve its
capacity and encourage its independence; encourage the
establishment of a permanent independent human rights commis sion
through the extension of financial and technical support.
For further information, contact Human Rights Watch, 485 Fifth
Avenue
New York, NY 10017-6104 TEL: 212/972-8400 FAX: 212/972-0905
E-mail:
hrwnyc@hrw.org;1522 K Street, N.W. Washington D.C. 20005 TEL:
202/371-6592 FAX: 202/371-0124 E-mail: hrwdc@hrw.org
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