For the Attention of the Country Report Task Force On

Conscience and Peace Tax International Internacional de Conciencia e Impuestos para la Paz NGO in Special Consultative Status with the Economic and Social Council of the UN

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Contact: Derek Brett Geneva Representative Avenue Adrien-Jeandin 18 1226 Thônex. Tel./fax: 022 860 24 63 Email: [email protected]

Submission to the 99th Session of the Human Rights Committee: July 2010 for the attention of the Country Report Task Force on ETHIOPIA Conscientious objection to military service and related issues

prepared April 2010

Ethiopia has been involved in a series of overlapping internal and international armed conflicts since the 1970's. To the civil conflicts against Tigre and Ogaden guerrillas was added the eventually successful struggle for Eritrean secession. A subsequent border war with Eritrea cost perhaps 50,000 lives in the three years 1998 to 2000, and although the conflict is no longer active peace has not returned to the border, and since 2006/2007 Ethiopia and Eritrea have been accused of fighting a proxy war in Somalia; this has also led to renewed conflict with the ethnic Somali population in the South of Ethiopia.1

Ethiopia has never had the sort of formalised recruitment into obligatory military service which lends itself to proper provision for the recognition of conscientious objection to military service, and no cases have been reported where Ethiopian citizens have sought recognition as conscientious objectors. The problem which has arisen in Ethiopia is one of indiscriminate forced recruitment, practised by both opposition and government during the Eritrean war of secession, and which in particular resulted in the involvement of several thousand children as soldiers, some as young as twelve years old.. Ethiopia was chosen as one of the case studies which contributed to the UN Study on the Impact of Armed Conflict on Children (the Machel study); government methods are described vividly in a quotation from that case study:

“ An extreme version of forcible recruitment is the press ganging. This is known as “Afesa” in Amharic. A group of armed militia, police, or party cadres would roam the streets and marketplaces, picking up any individual or rounding up any groups they came across. Alternatively, they would surround an area and force every man and boy to sit down or stand up against a wall, using a threat of opening fire. All those eligible would then be forced on to a truck and driven away. Young men were recruited while playing football, on side streets and alleyways, going to school or market places, or attending religious festivals. Teenage boys who worked in the informal

1 Information derived from the International Institute of Security Studies “Armed Conflict Database”, (http://acd.iiss.org) sector selling cigarettes, matches, sweets, chewing gum and lottery tickets were a particular target.”2 The same source reports that it was not unknown for those resisting or attempting to escape recruitment to be summarily executed.

Such forcible recruitment is no longer as endemic as it was, but there were for instance reports of such a campaign when Ethiopia first intervened in Somalia3. A particular concern is that these abusive methods of recruitment seem to be given official sanction by Defence Force Proclamation No. 27 / 1996, which states that the Defence Ministry “may, in accordance with criteria issued by it from time to time, recruit persons fit and willing for military purposes.” Failure to respond to such a call up would result in imprisonment; in time of emergency, general mobilization or war, imprisonment could be for ten years.4

There is also not believed to now be systematic use of child soldiers in the Ethiopian military. Ethiopia has not yet signed the Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child on the involvement of children in armed conflict, but reporting to the Committee on the Rights of the Child under the Convention itself it stated that eighteen was the minimum legal age for all military recruitment. However, one particular concern with random methods of forced recruitment is that even when they have some backing in conscription law it is very hard to ensure that they do not result in the recruitment of juveniles. Furthermore, in its concluding observations 5, the Committee on the Rights of the Child expressed concern that lack of adequate birth registration might make the legal restriction on recruitment ages difficult to enforce.

Suggestions for the list of issues

CPTI suggests that Ethiopia is asked what steps it is taking to ensure that the provisions in Defence Force Proclamation No. 27 /1996 are not abused in order to justify forced recruitment and what action it takes when cases of forced recruitment are brought to the Government's attention.

2 Quoted in Brett, R.& McCallin, M., Children:the invisible soldiers (Rädda Barnen, Stockholm) 1998 (2nd edition), p.50 3 See for instance the summary in “Somalia and Ethiopia; forced recruitment and conscription for war” in CO Update No. 26 (War Resisters International, London, January 2007) 4 Coalition to Stop the Use of Child Soldiers, Child Soldiers Global Report 2008 (London, 2008), p.142. 5 CRC/C/ETH/CO/3, 1st November 2006, para 67.