Foreign Affairs committee  I can hear you now. I had the mute on.

Foreign Affairs committee  Thank you very much for inviting Human Rights Watch to participate. It's a great opportunity to discuss some of these issues that we've been concerned about for some time at Human Rights Watch. I'd like to touch briefly on three issues in my opening remarks. One is that I would

Foreign Affairs committee  Yes. I want to talk very briefly about the development aid work we did in 2009. This was research that we conducted across 53 kebeles in three different states of Ethiopia. Essentially we found that opposition supporters were routinely barred from access to government services,

Foreign Affairs committee  There are several issues here. One is that when we say that aid is continuing to increase but that we're not seeing any resulting influence. Even since 2008, the aid figures now are up to $4 billion or more per year going into Ethiopia. Yet on the other hand, you see the human ri

Foreign Affairs committee  There's been a variety of mining and other interests also in the Somali region, some Malaysian companies and others. As I said earlier, I think the big issue here for Human Rights Watch is the need for monitoring and investigation. This is where we are not seeing any real improve

Foreign Affairs committee  There is now a wide consensus on some of the criteria that make a national human rights institution effective. There are a number of actors, including Human Rights Watch, who have done evaluations of commissions across the continent and across the globe. We also have the Paris pr

Foreign Affairs committee  The first step should be for donors to push to reverse the civil society law and to bring the general human rights environment back to the limited freedoms that were available a couple of years ago. We're at a point today where it is extraordinarily difficult for any independent

Foreign Affairs committee  You have to bolster your efforts to get the government to amend this law, which violates its own constitution as well as international standards. That is the precondition, that and the anti-terrorism law, which they're using to imprison journalists for printing material that is c

Foreign Affairs committee  If I may just say, I don't think it's a question of capacity. The Ethiopian Human Rights Commission has received, from my reading, several million dollars basically for technical support, computers, etc. What you need here is political will to allow these institutions to function

Foreign Affairs committee  Ethiopia is far from being a lawless land. It's one of the most highly controlled and hierarchical societies and governments in the region. It's very hard to imagine any government policy being put in place that is not sanctioned at the highest levels. That includes to a large ex

Foreign Affairs committee  Yes. There are definitely groups or categories of people that are most at risk of being attacked or targeted, for everything from intimidation to torture and detention. Those groups include political opposition members or supporters, or sometimes even people who are perceived to

Foreign Affairs committee  This was the subject of one of the reports we published in 2010, which looked at the way that individuals perceived to be supporters of the opposition were denied access to some government services because they were perceived to support the opposition, and we documented this, par

Foreign Affairs committee  In a way, Ethiopia has quite a privileged position, because it is the host of the African Union. Of course, the African Union is located in Addis Ababa. Basically, I would say that the UN and the African Union have been extraordinarily weak in making any kind of criticism of the

Foreign Affairs committee  This is what I mentioned before about donors, particularly the large donors—the U.S., the United Kingdom, Canada, the European Union, the World Bank and others—really needing to put their feet down, first, in terms of actually monitoring their own programs. As I mentioned, there

Foreign Affairs committee  It's not ours. The bank accounts of the Ethiopian Human Rights Council,an Ethiopia n organization, were frozen, and they've been in a long-running lawsuit over the last two years to try to get them unfrozen.