page_title: Ethiopia
section_title: Human rights
hierarchical_section_title: Ethiopia / Politics / Human rights
caption_attribution_description: Shots depicting the Lower Valley of the Omo River, UNESCO World Heritage Site, and inhabitants of Southern Ethiopia.
context_page_description: Ethiopia, officially the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia, is a landlocked country in East Africa. It shares borders with Eritrea to the north, Djibouti to the northeast, Somalia to the east, Kenya to the south, South Sudan to the west and Sudan to the northwest. With over 109 million inhabitants as of 2019, Ethiopia is the most populous landlocked country in the world and the second-most populous nation on the African continent. The country has a total area of 1,100,000 square kilometres. Its capital and largest city is Addis Ababa, which lies several kilometres west of the East African Rift that splits the country into the African and Somali tectonic plates. Ethiopian national identity is grounded in the historic and contemporary roles of Christianity and Islam, and the independence of Ethiopia from foreign rule, stemming from the various ancient Ethiopian kingdoms of antiquity.
  Some of the oldest skeletal evidence for anatomically modern humans has been found in Ethiopia. It is widely considered as the region from which modern humans first set out for the Middle East and places beyond.
context_section_description: Recent human rights violations include the killing of 100 peaceful protestors by direct government gunfire in the Oromo and Amhara regions in 2016. The UN has called for UN observers on the ground in Ethiopia to investigate this incident, however the EPRDF-dominated Ethiopian government has refused this call. The protestors are protesting land grabs and lack of basic human rights such as the freedom to elect their representatives. The TPLF-dominated EPRDF won 100% in an election marked by fraud which has resulted in Ethiopian civilians protesting on scale unseen in prior post-election protests.
  Merera Gudina, leader of the Oromo People's Congress, said the East African country was at a "crossroads". "People are demanding their rights," he said. "People are fed up with what the regime has been doing for a quarter of a century. They're protesting against land grabs, reparations, stolen elections, the rising cost of living, many things. "If the government continue to repress while the people are demanding their rights in the millions that (civil war) is one of the likely scenarios," Merera said in an interview with Reuters.
  According to surveys in 2003 by the National Committee on Traditional Practices in Ethiopia, marriage by abduction accounts for 69% of the nation's marriages, with around 80% in the largest region, Oromiya, and as high as 92% in the Southern Nations, Nationalities, and Peoples' Region. Homosexual acts are illegal in Ethiopia. Journalists and activists have been threatened or arrested for their coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic in Ethiopia.
  Among the Omotic Karo-speaking and Hamer peoples in southern Ethiopia, adults and children with physical abnormalities are considered to be mingi, "ritually impure". The latter are believed to exert an evil influence upon others; disabled infants have traditionally been murdered without a proper burial. The Karo officially banned the practice in July 2012.
  In 2013, the Oakland Institute released a report accusing the Ethiopian government of forcing the relocation of "hundreds of thousands of indigenous people from their lands" in the Gambela Region The report describes the Ethiopian government's "plans to move over 1.5 million people" by the end of 2013, in order to allow foreign investors to develop the land for large scale industrial agriculture. According to several reports by the organization, those who refused were the subject of a variety of intimidation techniques including physical and sexual abuse, which sometimes led to deaths. A similar 2012 report by Human Rights Watch also describes the Ethiopian government's 2010–2011 villagization program in Gambella, with plans to carry out similar resettlements in other regions. The Ethiopian government has denied the accusations of land grabbing and instead pointed to the positive trajectory of the countries economy as evidence of the development program's benefits.
  Map of the Regions of Ethiopia; each is based on ethnicity and language, rather than physical geography or history.
  Despite a wide range of support from all over the world, and even winning Nobel peace prize for 2019, Prim minister Abiy Ahmed has failed to deliver the peace and integrity he promised in the highly divided nation. A nationwide series of violent protests, concentrated in the Oromia Region, broke out starting on 23 October 2019, sparked by activist and media owner Jawar Mohammed's allegation that security forces had attempted to detain him. According to official reports, 86 people were killed, mostly by mobs targeting ethnic and religious minorities within the region and surrounding areas, including Addis Ababa, Dire Dawa, and the Harari Region.
  On 29 May 2020, Amnesty International released a report accusing the security forces of Ethiopia of mass detentions and extrajudicial killings. The report stated that in 2019, at least 25 people, suspected of supporting the Oromo Liberation Army, were killed by the forces in parts the Oromia Region. Besides, between January and September 2019, at least 10,000 people were detained under suspicion, where
caption: Karo people in the Southern Nations, Nationalities, and Peoples' Region
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