Human and Group Rights Issues in Ethiopia: A Reply to Kjetil Tronvoll

In an article published in the International Journal on Minority and Group Rights ('Human Rights Violations in Ethiopia: When Ethnic Identity is a Political Stigma', 15(1) (2008) 49-79), Kjetil Tronvoll from Oslo University argued that in federal Ethiopia, the violations of human rights are in some ways ethnically motivated. Tronvoll's arguments are based on the concluding observations of the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) on Ethiopia. The objective of my Reply is to show that both CERD and Tronvoll have made unsubstantiated generalisations in trying to gauge any violation of human rights in Ethiopia as an ethnically-motivated occurrence. With this purpose in view, the current article briefly discusses the constitutional legal framework of the Ethiopian federal system, and critically examines the positions of CERD and Dr. Tronvoll.