Oral statement, Human Rights Council, 19 June 2014.

August 27, 2014

Fleeing from abuse in Ethiopia and seeking refuge in Kenya, Djibouti, Somaliland, South Africa and Egypt, 187 refugees have described in detail, during hour-long interviews how they and their close families were persecuted.[1]

Nearly all reported arbitrary detention of relatives and 126 were themselves detained. Over half of those interviewed (95 – 51%) had been tortured, which amounted to 75% of former detainees. Rarely do refugee populations report experiencing torture to this extent.

Rape was reported by 25% of women/girl refugees (21 of 85). Just over half of women/girl refugees who had been detained (41) were raped in detention, almost always repeatedly and by more than one officer, and sometimes by up to eight at a time.

Refugees reported 87 disappearances in detention, of whom 69 were first degree relatives – parents, children, siblings or spouses.

Extra-judicial killings of those whom refugees were able to name – friends, neighbours, relatives or co-detainees – were reported of 372 individuals, 84 of whom were first degree relatives.

There are more than 250,000 Oromo refugees in the world. If only one tenth of that number has experienced the intensity of abuse meted out to the interviewees in Africa, hundreds of thousands of detentions without trial, at least 50,000 political killings, over 11,000 disappearances and over 6000 cases of rape by members of the security forces can be assumed to have taken place in Ethiopia since 1992.

While Ethiopia has enjoyed favoured aid status and millions of it population have remained dependent on food aid, its oppressive policies have stifled pluralism and denied more than a fraction of democratic space to opposition groups. It has one of the most sophisticated security and surveillance systems in Africa and maintains a large, well-equipped army and air-force.

Despite ongoing food-dependency, more than one million hectares of arable land has been leased to foreign investors growing for foreign markets while hundreds of thousands of local farmers have been evicted from their land.