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The Associated Press

Posted: Oct. 12, 2018 3:56 pm

UNITED NATIONS (AP) — Human rights groups and the United States said U.N. Human Rights Council elections Friday gave abusive countries a seat at a table where they should be called out, as nations including the Philippines and Eritrea won an uncontested election.

Eighteen countries, ranging from India to the Bahamas to Denmark, were chosen in a U.N. General Assembly vote.

With no competition, each candidate got well over the 97 needed votes, including the Philippines, widely condemned internationally for a deadly drug crackdown, and Eritrea, which has faced criticism from a commission set up by the council itself.

“Elevating states with records of gross human rights violations and abuses is a tremendous setback,” said Amnesty International USA’s advocacy director, Daniel Balson. “It puts them on the world stage, and moreover, it empowers them to fundamentally undermine notions of human rights that are accepted internationally.”

U.S. Ambassador Nikki Haley said the “lack of standards continues to undermine the organization and demonstrates again why the United States was right to withdraw from it” in June.

The U.N. missions for Eritrea and the Philippines didn’t immediately respond to inquiries about the vote and the criticism. Eritrea’s mission tweeted that the Horn of Africa nation “will work for enhanced dialogue and (an) effective” Human Rights Council.

U.N. officials, meanwhile, declined to opine on the vote results but suggested all council members should be open to scrutiny of their own handling of human rights.

“It’s clear that the world expects the members of international bodies to abide by a certain set of standards of behavior consistent with the bodies they have been elected to,” said Monica Grayley, a spokeswoman for General Assembly President Maria Fernanda Espinosa Garces.

The 47-member Human Rights Council can spotlight abuses and has special monitors watching certain countries and issues. It also periodically reviews human rights in every U.N. member country.

Created in 2006 to replace a commission discredited because of some members’ sorry rights records, the new council soon came to face similar criticism. The U.S. left partly because it saw the group as a forum for hypocrisy about human rights, though also because Washington says the council is anti-Israel.

The Philippines will join at a time when President Rodrigo Duterte’s war on drugs has left more than 4,800 mostly poor suspects dead in clashes with police, by the government’s account; rights groups say the toll is much higher. Over 155,000 other people have been arrested in the two-year-old campaign, which has alarmed Western governments, U.N. groups and rights organizations.

Duterte has denied condoning unlawful police killings in the drug war, though he has repeatedly threatened death to drug dealers.

Eritrea hasn’t held a presidential election since independence in 1993, and rights groups have long accused the country of having a harsh system of military conscription that has spurred many citizens to flee. A U.N. commission of inquiry in recent years found widespread human rights abuses, including forced labor. The government said the allegations were unfounded and one-sided.

Eritrea recently reached a peace agreement with neighboring Ethiopia after decades of war and unease, but it remains to be seen whether the conscription system will change.

Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and other rights groups also raised red flags about some other countries elected to the council Friday, including Bahrain and Cameroon.

Bahrain has been cracking down on dissent. In Cameroon, rights activists say civilians have been subjected to abuses amid fighting between English-speaking separatists and government security forces, and it is thought that thousands of people who fled the violence were unable to vote in Sunday’s presidential election.

Bahrain’s and Cameroon’s U.N. missions didn’t immediately respond to inquiries Friday.

The new members of the Geneva-based council also include Argentina, Austria, Bangladesh, Bulgaria, Burkina Faso, the Czech Republic, Fiji, Italy, Somalia, Togo and Uruguay.

Source=https://eritreahub.org/usa-and-rights-groups-say-un-rights-council-vote-lets-abusers-in

Since peace dawned in July, Eritrean refugees have flooded into Ethiopia. But the weight of new arrivals has left the region struggling to cope, raising fears the border could close again

Source: Guardian

Fri 12 Oct 2018 07.00 BST

People go about their business along the border between Eritrea and Ethiopia, which was opened on 11 September following a July peace deal between the two countries. Photograph: Michael Tewelde

Abraham and Binyam* had failed to escape before. The two Eritrean men, both in their early 20s and from the small town of Adi Keyh, are draft dodgers. Like hundreds of thousands of their compatriots over the past decade, they longed to cross the border into neighbouring Ethiopia to avoid a life of indefinite national service. Abraham attempted it in 2016, Binyam in February last year.

Both were arrested and imprisoned. Abraham was incarcerated for five months, during which he says he was beaten with batons and belts and fed only a few pieces of bread each day. Binyam was detained for a week, during which only one comfort break was allowed each day – out in a field, because the prison had no toilets. Both were then sent to the military, from which they absconded, returning to their hometown and a life in the shadows.

It isn’t like it is now. Now everyone is crossing. But then it was life or death,” says Abraham at a housing estate on the outskirts of the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa.The opening of the border with Ethiopia on 11 September, following a historic peace agreement in July, has changed everything. Suddenly, without a word from the Eritrean government, border patrols have disappeared. For the first time in decades, Eritreans can leave the country without a passport, a permit or even a promise to return.

Abraham and Binyam, along with thousands of other Eritreans, made straight for the Ethiopian border town of Zalambessa. From there they took a bus to Addis Ababa, where they arrived on September 22nd. Neither has any plan to return.

“I was euphoric,” Abraham says. “I thought all my worries would be solved overnight.”

Since September 11th at least 15,000 Eritreans have crossed into Ethiopia, according to local authorities. Many have come to trade and to visit the friends and family from whom they were separated in 1998, when war broke out. On arriving in Ethiopia, Abraham was reunited with a half-sister he had not seen in more than 20 years. The border had been almost impermeable since Ethiopia’s failure to implement a UN peace deal signed in 2000.

Most dramatic, though, has been the swell of refugees. The number registering each day has multiplied sevenfold, according to the UNHCR, the UN refugee agency. Between 12 September and 2 October nearly 10,000 arrived seeking asylum, mostly women and children hoping to reunite with family members who left illegally before the border opened.

Others, such as Even, who arrived in Addis Ababa from the Eritrean capital Asmara three weeks ago, have yet to register but plan to do so. The 25 year-old says he wants to join his family in Switzerland as soon as possible. His father and siblings left Eritrea four years ago, while he was still in prison for attempting to escape military service.

In the absence of border patrols, the number of Eritreans making for Ethiopia has risen sevenfold. Photograph: Michael Tewelde

In the regional capital of Mekele, in Ethiopia’s Tigray region, buses are full of Eritreans en route to Addis Ababa. One middle-aged couple, in Ethiopia to visit a sister the wife last saw before the war, waited in a hotel for a week because tickets had sold out. The city is also crowded with Eritreans looking for jobs and rooms to rent. One Ethiopian tour guide in Mekele, who asked not to be named, said he met a group of 10 young Eritrean girls who came looking for work as waitresses and housemaids.

Some worry about the burden the influx of new arrivals is placing on the region. The same Mekele local said he found a group of five teenage Eritrean boys living in a room without enough food to eat. He took a 15-year-old called Daniel into his home after discovering the child arrived in the city on the back of a truck with only 40 nakfa (£2) in his pocket. He later paid for him to go home to Asmara.

Meanwhile the region’s refugee camps are struggling to cope with the sudden strain. Ethiopia now hosts more than 175,000 refugees from across the border.

Many of the new arrivals fear the frontier will close again. A common rumour is that it was supposed to open only for a week or so for Eritreans, though the government in Asmara has not said this. Reports of Eritrean officers hunting for defectors have heightened such fears. So too have incidents, confirmed by the Guardian, of Eritreans being denied passports and assistance at their new embassy in Addis Ababa in order to migrate further afield.

The UNHCR has said that Ethiopia remains firmly committed to the protection of refugees from Eritrea, but many – including those who arrived years before the peace agreement – remain doubtful. Even has yet to register, because he says he heard rumours he might be sent back to Eritrea if he does.

Details of the deals struck between Isaias Afwerki, Eritrea’s only president since independence from Ethiopia in 1993, and Abiy Ahmed, Ethiopia’s new prime minister, have not been made public, which has also provoked suspicion.

“We are scared our status will be revoked,” says an Eritrean teacher who arrived in Ethiopia more than a year ago. “We don’t know what deal this government has made with ours.”

Not all intend to stay, even among those who make it as far as Addis Ababa. Even’s friend plans to return to Asmara in a couple of weeks, though he says he describes his decision as unusual. The 24-year-old says that, as a Pentecostal Christian, he came to take advantage of Ethiopia’s relative religious freedom. Pentecostalism is banned in Eritrea and his father has been in prison for eight years for his beliefs.

“I just came to worship freely and be blessed by the preachers,” he says. “But my mother needs me back home.”

In the absence of domestic reform inside Eritrea, peace with Ethiopia will probably mean that many more people simply leave for good. Despite signs the government intends to limit indefinite national service, and downsize the army, there has been almost nothing concrete yet.

Meanwhile, a former finance minister was reportedly arrested in September for publicly criticising the president, and more Pentecostal Christians were arrested in August.

“I never want to go back,” says Abraham, “because I’m a deserter, and if you desert your country the government won’t ever let you go.”

Source=https://eritreahub.org/i-was-euphoric-eritreas-joy-becomes-ethiopias-burden-amid-huge-exodus