GENEVA (AN) — An expert panel warned of grave human rights concerns in Ethiopia's Tigray region a day after an NGO pointed to a government effort to discredit the U.N. health agency's leader.
A new report on Tuesday from the U.N.'s International Commission of Human Rights Experts on Ethiopia warned of an "overwhelming risk" the government and armed groups will perpetrate more war crimes and crimes against humanity.
“We are gravely concerned about the situation in Ethiopia and the potential for future atrocities,” said Mohamed Chande Othman, who chairs the commission that has investigated Ethiopia's Tigray, Amhara, Afar and Oromia regions.
The 47-nation U.N. Human Rights Council appointed the commission in 2021 to investigate abuses of human rights, humanitarian aid and refugees in Ethiopia.
The commission's warning comes on the heels of another U.N. report concluding that war crimes and crimes against humanity have been committed in Ethiopia since late 2020.
In August, the U.N. panel urged all sides to respect human rights and defuse the violence in Ethiopia's conflict-ridden Amhara region.
Federal authorities tried to disband its militia fighters after a two-year conflict in the nearby Tigray region where hundreds of thousands of people were killed.
The World Health Organization's Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, formerly Ethiopia's foreign minister and its health minister, has been outspoken in calling for peace in both Amhara and Tigray, where he has family.
During a press briefing on Aug. 2022, for instance, he blamed racism as a major factor behind the humanitarian crisis in the Tigray region, which he called "the worst catastrophe on Earth" caused by conflict, drought and government neglect.
An African NGO said on Monday it uncovered evidence of an Ethiopian government effort to discredit Tedros last year in the runup to his re-election in May 2022 to a second five-year term as WHO chief.
Later that year, a tenuous ceasefire took hold in Tigray. But the cessation-of-hostilities agreement between Ethiopia's government and the Tigray People’s Liberation Front has not restored the peace.
A 'setback' to good governance
The Platform to Protect Whistleblowers in Africa said Tedros was "targeted by an Ethiopian government investigation that appears to have been politically motivated."
Ethiopia's Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, a 2019 Nobel Peace Prize laureate, has publicly objected to Tedros speaking out about the Tigray region in his high-profile role as leader of the global response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
PPLAAF, an NGO founded in 2017 by lawyers, anti-corruption activists and investigative journalists, said the government's investigation "relied on questionable information sources and unsubstantiated allegations" against Tedros.
It said it discovered the investigation among a large number of internal Ethiopian government emails and documents that it received from the Distributed Denial of Secrets, a group that, in turn, got them from an anonymous source.
The documents came from Ethiopia's agency that monitors financial transactions, the NGO said, and many of the unfounded allegations involved Ethiopian health organizations.
PPLAAF shared the materials with news organizations in the U.S., Germany, Switzerland and South Africa. Bloomberg's report called it "The Secret Plot Against the Head of the World Health Organization."
PPLAAF said the "government investigation and a broader intimidation campaign" were linked to the Tigray conflict, but the government did not respond to requests for comment from the NGO and its media partners.
“When government officials subvert the fight against corruption and financial crime to settle political scores, it undermines the rule of law and is a setback to authentic good governance efforts," said Gabriel Bourdon-Fattal, project manager for Paris-based PPLAAF, which has offices in Dakar, Senegal, and Johannesburg.
