Falls Church, Virginia (12/15/2021) — On December 13, 2021, the Secretariat for the UN Human Rights Council (Council) announced that, at the request of the European Union, it would convene a special session of the Council on the grave human rights situation in Ethiopia on December 17, 2021. During this session, the Council will consider adopting a resolution on Ethiopia. This resolution acknowledges that violations of human rights “have continued to be committed by all parties across a number of regions in Ethiopia, including Afar, Amhara, Oromia and Tigray” since the start of the conflict in northern Ethiopia in November 2020. It would also establish an international Commission of Human Rights Experts on Ethiopia charged with conducting “thorough investigations into allegations of violations and abuses of international human rights law and violations of international humanitarian law and international refugee law in Ethiopia, committed since 3 November 2020 by all parties to the conflict”.
While OLLAA generally supports the content of this resolution, we believe that the investigation will be far too narrow in scope to address the root causes of instability and conflict across Ethiopia. OLLAA believes that attempts to address the crisis in Ethiopia must not focus on the conflict in Tigray and other northern regions of Ethiopia as an isolated incident, but rather, as part of a pattern of volatile and repressive tactics utilized by both the current and former governments that affect most of Ethiopia’s ethnic communities including the Oromo, Kemant, Benishangul, Afar, Gambela, Agaw, Sidama and Somali.
As such, OLLAA has transmitted a letter to the Permanent Delegation of the European Union to the United Nations in Geneva outlining our concerns and requesting that they expand the scope of the investigation to include all allegations of human rights abuses perpetrated across Ethiopia since Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed came to power in 2018.
OLLAA is an umbrella organization that represents dozens of Oromo communities around the world.