Claiming to speak for “the people of Eritrea”, diaspora based Eritrean Government Supporting cliques who chose to live abroad in comfort have published a complete denial of every part of the remarkably extensive, witness-testimony-based report of the UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of Human Rights in Eritrea.
Without addressing any of the remarkably detailed evidence from eye-witnesses contained in the report, the so-called “Petition”, declares the whole of the UN Rapporteur’s Report to be “preposterous” in its documentation of severe human rights abuses by the Government of Eritrea. The remarkably detailed evidence cited by successive UN Rapporteurs is sweepingly dismissed as being “based on unsubstantiated allegations”.
One must wonder how the Petition’s authors explain away the thousands of named citizens who have been illegally detained without charge or trial for decades? or the thousands of documented reports of torture endured by innocent civilians? Or how they explain the well- documented half a million citizens who have fled the country? — many to save themselves from the terror of being captured for lifelong military service? Why should half a million people want to leave a country where “we enjoy fundamental rights and justice”?
One of the main allegations of the “Petition” is that “the report from the ‘special rapporteur’ only refers to data collected from those who confirm its biases”, and accuses the Rapporteur of failing to uphold the UN principles of “neutrality, impartiality and independence”. There is of course a simple reason why the Rapporteur has not been able to take evidence from within Eritrea: every time a UN Rapporteur has requested permission to visit Eritrea to gather such evidence, his request is never answered and permission is never given.
The Government of Eritrea seems so concerned about protecting its own version of human rights within the country that it will not allow any independent and neutral UN officials to hear from individuals within Eritrea about their personal experience. Without access to the millions of witnesses within the country, it is difficult to fault the Rapporteur’s selection of witnesses as biased, when it is the government of Eritrea which has imposed its own bias on the witnesses available. Why are unbiased researchers and witnesses excluded from Eritrea if there is nothing to hide?
The Petition takes great pride in lauding the “education which is free until tertiary education, throughout the country”. Unfortunately, it fails to mention the enforced participation of all 17-year-olds into a brutal military training camp at Sawa for their last year, after which they cannot escape lifelong National Service. The Rapporteur’s report reveals how so many young people (male and female) never complete their education because of fear of military conscription, and the huge proportion leaving the country to escape the military.
When the Petition praises “the fundamental rights and justice that we enjoy today; fundamental human rights, the dignity and worth of the human person”, it is clearly referring to a different country. Where is the mention of hundreds arrested for their political views, religious beliefs and those held in shipping container prisons for years? Where is the mention of the hundreds forcibly disappeared by government security agents, never to be seen again? Where is the mention of the 1997 Constitution which President Afwerki has never implemented? Nothing has changed, the Eritrean people are still suffering, and crimes against humanity continue.
Such is the exaggerated nature of this “Petition” that it allows itself to assert, with arrogant self-confidence, that “Eritrea remains the only stable and secure country in the entire Horn of Africa region, if not the entire continent.” To an African from any other state, that must be the most ludicrous statement of all!
Indeed, the work of the Special Rapporteur on the human rights situation in Eritrea and the mandate remains as important as ever, and we strongly urge, every member state of the UN to recognise the vital necessity and the urgency of renewing his mandate and maintaining it until there is clear evidence of improvements on the human rights situation in Eritrea.
