Twelve civilian and military officials from Ethiopia and Eritrea have been the subject of a complaint for “war crimes” and “crimes against humanity” filed in Germany by survivors from Tigray, Legal Action Worldwide (LAW) announced today.
Eight survivors of the war in the northern Ethiopian region of Tigray “have filed an unprecedented criminal complaint with the German Federal Prosecutor’s Office,” according to a statement from the non-governmental organization (NGO) LAW, which invoked (to explain the location of the complaint) the principle of universal jurisdiction under German law, which allows certain serious crimes to be prosecuted in Germany regardless of where they were committed.
The Swiss-based NGO did not reveal the identities of the eight people targeted and told Agence France-Presse (AFP) that it could not “confirm or deny” whether Ethiopian Prime Minister Abyi Ahmed or Eritrean President Issaias Afeworki were mentioned.
The conflict in Tigray has caused bloodshed in the region between November 2020 and November 2022. The war, one of the deadliest in decades, with at least 600,000 deaths, pitted rebels against Ethiopian federal forces, supported by local militias and the Eritrean army.
The Tigray region was sealed off by federal authorities for most of the conflict, and no humanitarian aid was allowed into the region.
In a report submitted to the UN Human Rights Council in September 2022, experts considered that there were "reasonable grounds to believe" that violations of fundamental rights during the conflict in Tigray "amounted to war crimes and crimes against humanity".
In November 2021, a report jointly prepared by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights and the Ethiopian Human Rights Commission (EHRC) noted in particular “indiscriminate attacks against civilians, extrajudicial killings, torture, abductions (...), as well as sexual violence and looting”.
No comments:
Post a Comment