By: Patrick Foley
“We seldom see human rights violations of the scope and scale as we see in Eritrea today,”
(Sheila B. Keetharuth- United Nations Commission of Inquiry)
The Commission of Inquiry on Human Rights in Eritrea released a report on their year-long investigation on June 4th. The report left no question about the frequency or severity of human rights abuses in the East-African country. According to the opening lines of the document, the commission found, “the initial promises of democracy and rule of law incarcerated in the never-implemented Constitution of 1997, were progressively suppressed and then extinguished by the government.”
The Commission based their report completely on firsthand accounts even though they were refused entry to Eritrea. They were able to investigate the state of the country through confidential interviews with Eritrean immigrants and 160 written submissions. The three people on the Commission’s panel found that many potential witnesses declined to testify for fear that they were being monitored and that they risked jeopardizing their own or family members’ safety.
The exodus from Eritrea has been driven predominately by a system of mass surveillance, arbitrary detention and a brutal system of conscription that amounted to indefinite slavery. The report cited hundreds of counts of torture, extrajudicial executions, disappearances, forced labor and sexual violence. The panel reported that, “Information collected on people’s activities, their supposed intentions and even conjectured thoughts is used to rule through fear in a country where individuals are routinely arbitrarily arrested and detained, tortured, disappeared or extrajudicially executed”. Based on the document, the government “systematically silences anyone who is perceived as protesting against, questioning or expressing criticism” and maintained a “vast” network of detention sites, many of them secret or unofficial, in which the security services incarcerated people without trial or any form of judicial review. Border controls were partly intended to prevent people from evading national service in which “slavery-like practices” were routine, sexual violence against women was rife, and conscripts faced degrading treatment and abuses “on a scope and scale seldom witnessed anywhere else in the world,” the panel said. Eritrean authorities had imposed draconian measures to stop people from leaving the country, including a shoot-to-kill policy operated for many years in border areas.
The commission discovered that even with this harsh detention policy, the abuses committed by the Eritrean government have prompted hundreds of thousands of Eritreans to flee the country and that this mass emigration is actually a major driver of the migrant crisis in the Mediterranean. As of April 21, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees reported, 36,390 migrants have reached Greece, Italy and Malta via the Mediterranean Sea, with at least 1,776 dead or missing. It said that the largest group of people seeking refuge by nationality were Syrians, at 8,865, followed by 3,363 Eritreans, 2,908 Somalis and 2,371 Afghans. The International Organization for Migration has warned that the number of migrant deaths on the Mediterranean this year could surpass 30,000. The report urged other countries to offer protection to Eritrean asylum seekers to lower this shocking figure. With few exceptions, the panel said, Eritreans forced to return to their country were arrested, detained, and subjected to poor treatment and torture.