UN rights council rejects Eritrea’s bid to end human rights investigation

Human Rights Watch says Asmara’s determination was an effort to distract from autarkic reporting connected the ‘country’s dire rights record’.

The United Nations Human Rights Council has rejected Eritrea’s effort to unopen down an autarkic probe into alleged rights abuses, successful a determination hailed arsenic captious to preventing impunity.

Eritrea’s uncommon bid to scrap the mandate of the UN peculiar rapporteur connected its quality rights grounds was defeated connected Friday, with lone 4 votes successful favour, 25 against, and 18 abstentions.

The determination by Eritrea amazed immoderate observers and marked 1 of the fewer times a authorities nether progressive probe tried to extremity specified scrutiny done a ceremonial vote.

Human Rights Watch welcomed the outcome, calling it “an important connection that the planetary assemblage is not fooled by Eritrea’s efforts to distract from, and discredit, autarkic quality rights reporting connected the country’s dire rights record.”

Eritrea’s question argued that alleged rights violations were not systemic and blamed “capacity constraints” communal to different processing nations. But European states responded with a counter-resolution to widen the mandate for different year, which passed with ease.

In his latest report successful June, Mohamed Abdelsalam Babiker, the UN-appointed peculiar rapporteur and a Sudanese quality rights lawyer, said Eritrea had shown “no meaningful progress” connected accountability.

He referenced the 2016 UN enquiry that recovered “systematic, wide and gross quality rights violations … committed successful Eritrea nether the authorization of the Government … whitethorn represent crimes against humanity.”

In the 2016 report, the UN’s Commission of Inquiry (COI) for Eritrea said the authorities of President Isaias Afwerki had committed heinous crimes since independency a quarter-century ago, including the “enslavement” of 400,000 people.

Many of those abuses are allegedly linked to a harsh nationalist work programme successful the secretive Horn of Africa state, which for galore is astir intolerable to flight and which the COI compared to beingness enslavement.

Ending probe would alteration ‘impunity’

DefendDefenders, a pan-African quality rights organisation, said Babiker’s relation remained captious for victims and the wider Eritrean diaspora.

“The adept plays an indispensable role, not lone for the victims and survivors of Eritrea’s abuses, but besides for the Eritrean diaspora,” the radical said successful a statement.

The EU warned that terminating the mandate would alteration “impunity and repression to deepen successful silence.”

Eritrea’s representative, Habtom Zerai Ghirmai, lashed retired astatine the decision, accusing the EU of displaying a “neo-colonial saviour mentality complex”.

He added, “The continued hold of the Special Rapporteur’s mandate is an affront to crushed and justice.”

Iran, Sudan and Russia – each nether their ain UN investigations – supported Eritrea’s motion. China besides backed the move, arguing that specified mandates were a misuse of planetary resources.

Source:

Al Jazeera and quality agencies