UN-Backed Panel Urges Ethiopia to Cooperate with Atrocities Probe

Simon Marks
·2 min read
11

(Bloomberg) -- A United Nations-backed panel that’s probing human-rights violations during Ethiopia’s civil war called for the government’s full cooperation after its investigators failed to secure access to the scenes of some alleged crimes.

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The two-year war, which broke out in late 2020, pitted Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s forces against rebels from the northern Tigray province. In October, the UN Human Rights Council renewed the mandate of a group of experts tasked with investigating atrocities committed during the conflict.

“Our commission sees it very much in Ethiopia’s interests to cooperate with us on both access and transitional justice because it sends a signal to the international community and to their own people that they have turned a corner,” Steven Ratner, a senior member of the Commission of Human Rights Experts on Ethiopia, said by phone. “States that shun UN investigators and push them away are often regarded as pariah states.”

Government and Tigrayan leaders signed a peace deal in South Africa on Nov. 2 to end the war which left thousands of people dead, and the rebels have begun handing over their tanks, artillery units and armored vehicles to the army.

Read more: The Two-Year Conflict That’s Torn Ethiopia Apart: QuickTake

The government has meanwhile released policy options on how to ensure there is transitional justice for the victims. It states that processes that emphasize punishing offenders “would not achieve lasting peace and reconciliation.”

The UN team led by Mohamed Chande Othman, a former chief justice of Tanzania, is available to advise the government on how to improve its proposals, according to Ratner.

“We have a lot of expertise to offer and transitional justice is something that is specifically mentioned in the peace agreement,” he said. The panel won’t be “fixated on something that has happened in the last two years,” but sees itself as a mechanism that can help prevent a re-occurrence of the violence, Ratner said.

Ethiopia has invited the UN’s Human Rights office in Ethiopia to conduct its investigation alongside a probe by the Ethiopian Human Rights Commission. The latter panel’s impartiality was called into question after it released a report in 2021 that found all parties to the conflict committed violations that may have amounted to war crimes yet didn’t express a view on the proportionality of those crimes.

The UN commission’s current investigations will focus “in much more depth” about the role Eritrean forces played in the conflict, according to Ratner. Eritrea backed Abiy’s forces and has been implicated in perpetrating widespread atrocities, including raping and massacring civilians in Tigray.

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