Ethiopia is undertaking reforms to widen the political space, ensure freedom, liberty, justice equality and democracy. Though the ongoing reform touches all parts of state institutions, it is mainly focusing on political and democratic reforms. Above all, the reform on the justice sector is of paramount importance to sustain the ongoing change.
For the past couple of years, the failure of Ethiopia’s justice system has been sending the country to a bottomless pit. But following the continuous public dissidence against injustice of all kind, it seems that Ethiopians have now started to hope for better days.
On the other hand, they are now also hearing of terrifying stories of human rights abuses that happened before the reform. At the time, suspects and political prisoners suffered unimaginable human rights abuses at the hands of security personnel inside hidden places and underground torture rooms across the country. Besides the physical and psychological damages that they endured, some were also victims of extrajudicial killings.
And sorrowfully, most of the victims suffered all kind of human rights abuses merely because they tried to exercise their constitutional rights of freedom of expression and the likes. Using the repressive laws and proclamations that aimed at intimidating those who demand their constitutional rights as pretexts, the security personnel committed heinous crimes on humanity.
To add insult to injury, legal professionals, including judges, also completely abandoned their oath to serve the law and became instruments for executing political agendas. They allowed people from the executive body to abuse the judiciary branch for achieving political ends, or else oppression. Most often than not, the victims were falsely accused of trying to dismantle the constitutional order with force. And in the process, the public has lost trust in the judicial sector and the country’s courts. And the major challenge ahead will be on building new confidence in the judiciary.
That is why the justice sector is one of the priority areas of the reform. True, the past misdemeanors of the judicial system have caused grievances and loss of public confidence. And the government took public discussions on amending oppressive laws such as the anti-terrorism proclamation and the appointment of prominent lawyer and women’s rights activist, Meaza Ashenafi, as president of the Federal Supreme Court, as its first step of reforming the justice sector.
While this is taken as a bold move, it should be underlined here that this is just a first step in a long journey, and it requires time, commitment and determination to finish it.
The respect and execution of international laws and treaties that mostly deal with human and democratic rights need to receive due attention. The justice system should take maximum care in recruiting and appointing competent and ethical judges with integrity at all levels of the judicial system. And again, oppressive laws should be amended or suspended.
While looking at the future, it is also mandatory to deal with what happened in the past, i.e. dealing with past abuses and taking care of the victims. The Premier has already taken this bold step by publically apologizing for the abuses took place across the country by the government’s security forces. Once consensus on the past reached and investigations are held on what went wrong with the system, the focus and the discourse from then on should be on ensuring the supremacy of law.
The government should also be open to utilizing every possible support it gets from the international community, particularly in taking experiences from countries that went through a similar path as that of Ethiopia.
While time will tell, so far the government’s commitment to ensure the protection of human and democratic rights by reforming the justice sector is an encouraging move that needs to be appreciated. After all, an independent judicial sector is central to the ambition of democratizing the country.
Herald December 13/2018
