UN halts its two-year Ethiopia probe despite pleas from investigators

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An international investigation into war crimes in Ethiopia will be allowed to expire next week, despite pleas from investigators who warned of the high risk of further atrocities, a United Nations body has decided.

The UN Human Rights Council allowed a deadline to pass on Wednesday without any move to extend the investigation. It means that the probe will effectively die on Oct. 13, eliminating the last hope of international scrutiny for atrocities that have killed thousands of people in Ethiopia.

Human rights groups were outraged by the decision. They had been pressing the European Union and other council members to sponsor a resolution to renew the investigation’s mandate.

“It is shameful that they choose to ignore dire warnings from UN investigators about the very real risks of future atrocities in Ethiopia,” Amnesty International said in a social media post on Wednesday.

It said the EU and other council members “have turned their backs on victims and survivors.”

The International Commission of Human Rights Experts on Ethiopia (ICHREE), established by the UN rights council in 2021, has spent nearly two years documenting the evidence of large-scale killings of civilians, sexual assaults, attacks on refugee camps and indiscriminate shelling of civilian areas – mainly by Eritrean and Ethiopian soldiers, but also by militias from Ethiopia’s Tigray and Amhara regions.

It found that many of the crimes, including sexual assaults and killings, had continued after a peace agreement last November. In total, health centres in Tigray have counted more than 10,000 victims of sexual violence since the beginning of the war in 2020, and fewer than 30 cases have been brought to Ethiopia’s military courts for possible prosecution, the commission found.

Earlier this week, the commission warned that it had strong evidence of the “acute risk” of further atrocity crimes in Ethiopia. It urged the UN Human Rights Council to ensure the continuation of international scrutiny and independent investigations – a recommendation that the council seemingly rejected.

The Ethiopian government has been lobbying strenuously against the international investigation. It refused to allow the investigators to enter Ethiopia, forcing them to do their interviews remotely or in neighbouring countries where victims had fled.

Despite this obstacle, the commission produced two lengthy reports last year and this year. It interviewed 545 witnesses and analyzed more than 570 documents, including photos, videos, satellite images and medical records. In its latest report last month, it said it had evidence of continued rapes and sexual violence by Eritrean and Amhara forces for at least eight months after the peace agreement was signed last November.

Under the UN council’s internal protocols, the EU held administrative responsibility for resolutions on Ethiopia, so human rights groups had focused much of their lobbying efforts on European politicians. But in the end, they said, the EU had placed a higher priority on its economic and diplomatic relationship with the Ethiopian government.

In effect, the EU had decided to “simply bury” the international investigation because it felt that its short-term ties with the government were more important than the victims’ rights to justice, according to Philippe Dam, the EU director for Human Rights Watch, in a social media post on Wednesday.

The EU had suspended its aid to the Ethiopian government after the war began in 2020, but on Tuesday it announced the resumption of €650-million (about $940-million) in assistance to the country.

“It is time to gradually normalize relations and rebuild a mutually reinforcing partnership with your country,” EU commissioner for international partnerships Jutta Urpilainen said in a visit to Ethiopia. “This strategic partnership is now back on track.”

Global Affairs Canada, which is campaigning for a future Canadian seat on the UN Human Rights Council, did not respond to questions from The Globe and Mail about whether it supports or opposes the UN-appointed investigation in Ethiopia.

The Ethiopian government has argued that an international investigation is unnecessary because there are domestic justice processes within Ethiopia to handle the cases. But the international investigators found that those processes have no credibility and the perpetrators of atrocities have enjoyed almost complete impunity from prosecution. The commission’s chairperson, Mohamed Chande Othman, said last month that the prospects for accountability are “virtually non-existent” in Ethiopia today.

African governments have supported Ethiopia’s stance. The African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights, which reports to the African Union, disbanded its own investigation into the Ethiopian situation in June this year without publishing any reports.

“Without the comprehensive and sustained independent investigation that ICHREE has been providing there can be little hope that survivors, their families and communities can be healed and receive justice,” said Saman Zia-Zarifi, executive director of Physicians for Human Rights, in a statement on Wednesday.