Introduction
The Ethiopian Human Rights Commission (EHRC) is a National Human Rights Institution (NHRI) that was established in 2000. It has a mandate for the promotion and protection of human rights, which enables them to undertake human rights investigations and monitor prisons and public service institutions to ensure that international human rights standards are protected and observed.
Since it was established, the EHRC has faced criticism from leading civil society organizations that it lacked independence and was biased. That perception began to change after Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed came to power in 2018, and in 2021, several sources claimed that the EHRC appeared to have improved substantially in recent years. However, following the release of a joint report by the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) and the EHRC, which was widely viewed as an attempt by the EHRC to create a false equivalency between the scale of violations committed by the Ethiopian, Eritrean, Amharan forces and the TPLF, it appears the international community is again coming to recognize the failures of that body.
At the same time, it remains to be seen if the international community will denounce the EHRC as a whole, or if its criticisms will remain limited to its handling of the current conflict in Tigray. Many other ethnic communities have long argued that the EHRC is biased against the Oromo and other groups, and that it has continued to display such bias under Prime Minister Abiy’s leadership and following the appointment of its new Director. This bias can be seen in reports of the EHRC that seek to justify abuses perpetrated by Ethiopian security forces against Oromo civilians while seeking to amplify acts of violence committed by individuals, as well as in the incidents that they choose to investigate and report on. As such, it is imperative that the international community recognize the failure of the EHRC to serve as a credible NHRI, and condemn the body, particularly when it comes to allegations of human rights abuses perpetrated against the Oromo and in other southern regions.
The International Community’s Shifting Perspective of the EHRC
Since the EHRC was established in 2000, there have been numerous reports that the body lacked independence and displayed bias in its reporting on human rights issues. In one report regarding human rights abuses in Ogaden Jail, Human Rights Watch noted that EHRC investigations had “generally not met the most basic standards of impartiality”, and that there was little transparency regarding the work of the EHRC. In 2019, based on a review of EHRC reports conducted from 2016-2017, Amnesty International found that the EHRC had routinely “whitewashed human rights violations through compromised methodologies, dismissing credible allegations and eschewing a clear stand on human rights violations”, and called for the Ethiopian government to reform the EHRC.
Following the rise of Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed to power in 2018, Daniel Bekele was appointed as the new head of the EHRC. Proponents of his work claim that he has introduced several changes to the body, including by ensuring more independence in the selection of commissioners and staff, which have increased the independence of the EHRC. These changes appear to have had a positive effect on the international community’s perception of the EHRC. In June 2021, the Guardian published an article claiming that David Bekele had helped “turn [the EHRC] into something approaching a proper watchdog”, although the author noted that the joint UN investigation would be a “litmus test” for the EHRC. Similarly, the Global Alliance of National Human Rights Institutions, a body that assesses NHRI’s compliance with the Paris Principles, upgraded the EHRC’s status from a B to an A in October 2021.
At the same time, it must be noted that there were still critics of the EHRC following the regime change. This included their reporting on the conflict in Tigray, which began in November 2020. During that time, the TPLF accused David Bekele and the EHRC of being “too soft” on Abiy’s regime. Others decried their reporting on allegations of human rights abuses in Oromia (discussed below), as well as in other regions, often claiming that the EHRC displayed bias in the incidents they chose to investigate and report on.
In March 2021, the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) announced that it would conduct a joint investigation with the EHRC into allegations of human rights abuses carried out in the context of the Tigray conflict. Leading Tigrayan advocacy organizations, including Omna Tigray, the Global Society of Tigray Scholars, and others, swiftly condemned this decision, and urged the OHCHR not to include the EHRC in any such investigation.
Concerning reports were published regarding the credibility of the report, both before and after its publication, including: the expulsion of a UN Staffer who had led the investigation from Ethiopia; reports that Daniel Bekele had “underplayed” allegations regarding the Amhara militia’s role in perpetrating human rights abuses and instead sought to “highlight” abuses committed by Tigrayans; and the inability of the investigative team to visit sites where alleged massacres occurred. Michael Minassie, an ethnic Tigrayan who was initially hired as a translator by the UN for the joint investigation team, reported that he was quickly removed from the role after the EHRC team complained about his inclusion, and speculated that this was due to the EHRC’s desire to control the outcome of the investigation.
When the joint report was released in November 2021, it found that human rights violations had been committed by all parties to the conflict. The report faced a great deal of pushback from the international community, and multiple actors claimed that the report appeared to create a false equivalency between the abuses perpetrated by the Ethiopian, Eritrean, and Amhara forces and those committed by the TPLF. Human Rights Watch noted that the report “does not give well-documented trends the attention they deserve,” including by making “scant mention of the abuses committed by Amhara regional forces and militia”, and noting its failure to “acknowledge the scale of abuses, including sexual slavery, by Ethiopian, Eritrean, and Amhara forces targeting Tigrayan women and girls”. Leading Tigrayan advocacy organizations rejected the report, and called for the establishment of an independent investigation into the conflict. While many groups and States stopped short of denouncing the report, they did note several deficiencies in the report. Several countries, including the United States issued a statement noting that the investigators fased “considerable challenges […] in gaining access to places, people and documentation”.
In December 2021, the United Nations Human Rights Council adopted a resolution on the human rights situation in Ethiopia which called on the OHCHR to establish a Commission tasked with conducting an independent investigation into allegations of human rights violations committed since the start of the conflict in Tigray in November 2020. Numerous civil society organizations, including Human Rights Watch, who made a statement before the UN Human Rights Council stating that the joint investigation was “not comprehensive,” supported the establishment of this investigation. One cannot overlook the timing of passage of this resolution–just one month after the joint report was released. It appears that the EHRC had failed its “litmus test” in the eyes of the international community, and the public perception of the NHRI had once again shifted, this time in response to a biased report.
The EHRC’s Bias Against the Oromo
Similar to the rest of the country, there are longstanding claims that the EHRC has displayed bias when it comes to allegations of human rights abuses perpetrated against the Oromo or within the Oromia region. For example, Human Rights Watch deemed an EHRC investigation into the use of force by security forces at an Irreecha Festival in 2016 as “not credible.” These claims generally take 3 separate forms: 1) downplaying allegations of human rights abuses perpetrated by Ethiopian security forces; 2) reports that focus almost exclusively on the OLA, instead of other perpetrators of human rights violations against the Oromo; and 3) decisions not to investigate allegations of human rights abuses perpetrated against Oromo civilians.
- Downplaying violence perpetrated by Ethiopian security forces
In some cases, there appear to have been deliberate attempts by the EHRC to downplay abuses committed by Ethiopian security forces. For example, Amnesty International reviewed two EHRC reports on protests in Oromia in 2016 and 2017, and found that the EHRC did not “employ a human rights framework for its research”. One trend that they noted was the decision to refer to protests as “disturbances” or periods of “unrest” in these reports, which they speculated was part of an attempt to “to justify the use of lethal and other excessive force by security forces.” Although both reports highlighted that people were killed by security forces in the report, they found that their use of force was “largely proportional.”
Such trends continued after Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed came to power. For example, in June 2020, the popular Oromo singer and activist, Hachalu Hundessa was assassinated in Addis Ababa. The EHRC did not release its report on the protests that followed his death until six months later. At that time, they announced that they had produced a 59 page report detailing their findings, although it appears that this report was never publicly issued, if it existed at all. Instead, a 6 page report was released. The findings contained in the 6 page report shared multiple similarities with previous reports that had been deemed unreliable by leading civil society organizations.
First, as seen in the 2016 and 2017 reports reviewed by Amnesty International, the EHRC continually refers to the protests that broke out following Hachalu Hundessa’s death as a period of “unrest”, and sought to justify the acts of violence perpetrated by security forces. Despite reports of hundreds of deaths by civil society organizations, and the EHRC’s findings that “at least 76 deaths and 190 bodily injuries were caused by government security forces,” they continued to emphasize the fact that the security forces “had the challenging task of restoring order in the face of such widespread violence,” and at most, were willing to grant that the “proportionality of the force employed in some contexts is highly questionable,” despite their findings that there were incidents where persons, including both protesters and bystanders, were killed by shots to the head, chest, or back.
Secondly, as seen in the joint OHCHR-EHRC report on Tigray, it also appears that the EHRC attempted to distract from allegations of abuses by Ethiopian security forces by amplifying reports of violence committed by others against citizens. While it is absolutely true that there were acts of violence perpetrated by individuals who participated in the protests against civilians, the EHRC found that these attacks constituted the elements of crimes against humanity, thereby overshadowing any violence committed by Ethiopian security forces. This is especially noteworthy because the EHRC’s report does not contain a full analysis of how they arrived at this conclusion, although they pronounce bold findings, such as claiming that the perpetrators of various attacks, “knew that the conduct was part of or intended the conduct to be part of a widespread or systematic attack directed against a civilian population”, ostensibly because of social media posts and television broadcasts that were airing about attacks at the time. Without further explanation as to how they arrived at such a conclusion, it remains unclear that the acts of violence committed by protesters could reasonably be interpreted as meeting the elements of a crime against humanity.
- Reporting that focuses on the OLA, and seeks to cast all other acts of violence as intercommunal violence
Acts of mass violence against civilians are not uncommon throughout Ethiopia, including within the Oromia region, where attacks have been perpetrated by a wide variety of actors, including the Amhara regional forces, Oromia regional forces, the Ethiopian National Defense Forces, the Oromo Liberation Army (OLA), and Amhara militias (fano), among others. However, in its reporting, the EHRC tends to focus on attacks perpetrated by the OLA (who they often commonly refer to by other names, including “OLF militants”) and on intercommunal violence, over attacks committed by other actors.
Between November 2020 – October 2021, the EHRC issued 6 press releases or quotes regarding mass attacks against civilian populations in the Oromia region. Of these, 3 described acts of violence perpetrated by the OLA, 2 discussed attacks against civilians without any mention of the perpetrator of the attacks, and 2 discussed acts of intercommunal violence between ethnic Amharas and Oromos. What is especially notable about these reports are the absence of reporting on acts of violence perpetrated by other actors, despite allegations of such incidents occurring during this same period. For example, in October 2021, BBC Afaan Oromoo reported that Amhara militias attacked civilians in the West Shewa zone, leading to the death of at least 23 civilians. As noted above, the EHRC did not issue any kind of statement on this attack. By choosing not to report on incidents involving attacks on Oromo civilians by Amhara militias, Oromia regional forces, and others, the EHRC appears to be promoting a false narrative that all violence in Oromia is caused by the OLA or can be accounted for by sporadic acts of intercommunal conflict between ethnic groups, which is far from the reality on the ground. Not only does this not reflect reality, such coverage might be seen as an attempt to minimize the atrocities committed against the Oromo by the Ethiopian government.
This trend can also be seen in other parts of Ethiopia, including in the Oromia Special zone of the Amhara region, a zone populated mainly by Oromos. In March 2021, Amhara regional soldiers, supported by the Ethiopian National Defense Forces, invaded the Oromia special zone, after claiming that members of the OLA were hiding in the zone and that a direct strike was required to subdue them. The government soldiers, alongside Amhara militias (Fano), launched an ethnically motivated campaign against Oromo civilians, which official records show led to at least 328 deaths, and the forced displacement of at least 50,000 individuals within the North Shewa and Oromia Special zones, although actual figures are likely much higher. Instead of launching an investigation into these allegations of human rights abuses, the EHRC simply issued a quote in April regarding the violence in the North Shewa and Oromia Special zones, and, although they condemned the violence, they reduced it to a series of “ethnic based attacks and counter-attacks” between the Amhara and Oromo.
- Failure to report on allegations of abuse against Oromo civilians and other ethnic groups
Another area where bias can be seen in the EHRC’s reporting is in their decision whether to investigate an incident at all. The Addis Standard recently issued a report on recent acts of inter-communal violence between the Oromo and Amhara communities in the East Wollega zone. In this report, they noted that the EHRC failed to issue any statement regarding the recent displacement of 80-100,000 people in Guto Gida. When they asked the Monitoring and Investigation Hub Regional Director for the EHRC to explain why they did not issue a statement on this matter, he noted that the EHRC had “scaled down reporting on western Oromia due to the increasingly contradicting information surrounding the security situation in the area and the complexity of the matter.” One has to wonder how anyone can be expected to obtain accurate information about attacks against civilians in Oromia if the body tasked with serving as an independent investigator into allegations of human rights abuses simply refuses to conduct investigations in an area? What other explanation besides bias can explain the EHRC’s willingness to travel to war zones in northern Ethiopia, particularly in areas that are majority Amhara, to investigate allegations of human rights abuses when the body deems it too dangerous or complicated to investigate allegations in Oromia?
Conclusion:
Since it was established in 2000, the EHRC has been largely regarded by the international community as an unreliable source for information regarding human rights abuses in Ethiopia. This perception began to change when Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed came into power in 2018. However, the recent release of the joint UN OHCHR-EHRC report on allegations of human rights abuses in Tigray, which sought to create a false sense of equivalency between abuses committed by various parties to the conflict, has begun to shift the tide of public opinion yet again. Without the war in Tigray, how long would the EHRC’s legitimization of Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s regime have been allowed to continue?
It is yet to be seen if this shift in international perception will extend beyond the situation in Tigray to other regions, including Oromia. However, the blatant displays of bias that the EHRC has shown against the Oromo, including attempts to downplay violations perpetrated by Ethiopian security forces against civilians, attempts to paint the OLA as sole perpetrator of human rights abuses in Oromia, and decisions not to report on documented allegations at all, shows that this is not a body that can be trusted as a neutral or impartial watchdog. Now is the time for the international community to recognize the EHRC’s failure to act as an independent NHRI, and to condemn the institution accordingly.