Related Research Articles
Human rights in Eritrea are viewed, as of the 2020s, by non-governmental organisations (NGOs) such as Human Rights Watch as among the worst in the world, particularly with regards to freedom of the press. Eritrea is a one-party state in which national legislative elections have been repeatedly postponed, the judiciary is weak, and constitutional provisions protecting individual freedom have yet to be fully implemented. Some Western countries, particularly the United States, accuse the Government of Eritrea of arbitrary arrest and detentions and of detaining an unknown number of people without charge for their political activism. Additionally Eritrean citizens, both men and women, are forcibly conscripted into the military with an indefinite length of service and used as forced labour.
The Oromo Liberation Front is an Oromo nationalist political party formed in 1973 to promote self-determination for the Oromo people inhabiting today's Oromia Region and Oromia Zone in the Amhara Region of Ethiopia. The OLF has offices in Addis Ababa, Washington, D.C. and Berlin from where it operates Amharic and Oromo radio stations.
Eritrea, officially the State of Eritrea, is a country in the Horn of Africa region of Eastern Africa, with its capital and largest city at Asmara. It is bordered by Ethiopia in the south, Sudan in the west, and Djibouti in the southeast. The northeastern and eastern parts of Eritrea have an extensive coastline along the Red Sea. The nation has a total area of approximately 117,600 km2 (45,406 sq mi), and includes the Dahlak Archipelago and several of the Hanish Islands.
Libya is a transit and destination country for men and women from sub-Saharan Africa and Asia trafficked for the purposes of forced labor and commercial sexual exploitation. While most foreigners in Libya are economic migrants, in some cases large smuggling debts of $500–$2,000 and illegal status leave them vulnerable to various forms of coercion, resulting in cases of forced prostitution and forced labor.
Djibouti is a transit and, to a lesser extent, a source and destination country for men, women, and children who are subjected to trafficking in persons, specifically conditions of forced labor and forced prostitution. There is little verifiable data on the human trafficking situation in Djibouti. Large numbers of voluntary economic migrants from Ethiopia and Somalia pass illegally through Djibouti en route to Yemen and other locations in the Middle East; among this group, a small number of women and girls may fall victim to involuntary domestic servitude or forced commercial sexual exploitation after reaching Djibouti City or the Ethiopia-Djibouti trucking corridor. An unknown number of migrants – men, women, and children – are subjected to conditions of forced labor and forced prostitution after reaching Yemen and other destinations in the Middle East. Djibouti's large refugee population – consisting of Somalis, Ethiopians, and Eritreans – as well as foreign street children remain vulnerable to various forms of exploitation within the country, including human trafficking. Older street children reportedly act, at times, as pimps for younger children. A small number of girls from impoverished Djiboutian families may engage in prostitution with the encouragement of family members or other persons in prostitution. Members of foreign militaries stationed in Djibouti contribute to the demand for women and girls in prostitution, including trafficking victims.
Eritrean Canadians are a hyphenated ethnicity of Canadians who are of full or partial Eritrean national origin, heritage and/or ancestry, Canadian citizens of Eritrean descent, or an Eritrea-born person who resides in Canada. According to the 2021 Canadian census, 36,290 Canadians reported Eritrean ancestry.
Large numbers of refugee kidnappings in Sinai occurred between 2009 and 2014. Refugees from Sudan, Ethiopia or Eritrea were transported to Sinai and held hostage by members of Bedouin tribes. Typically, the hostages were forced to give up phone numbers of relatives and were tortured with the relatives on the phone, in order to obtain ransoms in the range of $20,000–$40,000. If the families could not pay, the hostages were killed. Israel ´s 2012 Egypt–Israel barrier at its border in Sinai to keep out African migrants caused the Rashaida traffickers to lose income from transporting refugees to the border, so they started to concentrate on kidnappings.
Sound of Torture is a 2013 documentary film written and directed by Israeli filmmaker Keren Shayo which follows Eritrean radio host and human rights activist Meron Estefanos as she reports on Eritrean refugees who have been captured in Sudan while migrating across the Sinai Peninsula into Israel.
The Oromo conflict is a protracted conflict between the Oromo Liberation Front (OLF) and the Ethiopian government. The Oromo Liberation Front formed to fight the Ethiopian Empire to liberate the Oromo people and establish an independent state of Oromia. The conflict began in 1973, when Oromo nationalists established the OLF and its armed wing, the Oromo Liberation Army (OLA). These groups formed in response to prejudice against the Oromo people during the Haile Selassie and Derg era, when their language banned from public administration, courts, church and schools, and the stereotype of Oromo people as a hindrance to expanding Ethiopian national identity.
Azezet Habtezghi Kidane is an Eritrean-born British nun and human trafficking activist working in Israel.
The Bani Walid detention camp is a secret prison in northwest Libya near the town of Bani Walid operated by human traffickers since at least 2009. Prisoners at the center often come from subsaharan Africa en route to Europe, and include adolescents and women. In order to extort their families, detention guards reportedly torture, rape, or threaten prisoners, who face similar conditions in other camps in the region. In May 2018, many Bani Walid prisoners attempted to escape, with most being shot or recaptured.
The Hitsats massacre was a massacre at Hitsats refugee camp on or around 19 November 2020 during the Tigray War. The civilians killed were 300 Eritrean refugees, according to Europe External Programme with Africa (EEPA), and five humanitarian workers, according to The New York Times, Associated Press, and the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.
Casualties of the Tigray War refers to the civilian and military deaths and injuries in the Tigray War that started in November 2020, in which rape and other sexual violence are also widespread. Precise casualty figures are uncertain. According to researchers at Ghent University in Belgium, as many as 600,000 people had died as a result of war-related violence and famine by late 2022. The scale of the death and destruction led The New York Times to describe it in November 2022 as "one of the world’s bloodiest contemporary conflicts."
All sides of the Tigray War have been repeatedly accused of committing war crimes since it began in November 2020. A September 2022 report by the UN found evidence of widespread "war crimes and crimes against humanity" committed by all parties, in particular, the Ethiopian federal government, the State of Eritrea and the Tigray People's Liberation Front (TPLF)."
Events in Hawzen in the Tigray War included five mass extrajudicial killings that took place in Hawzen in the Tigray Region of Ethiopia during the Tigray War in November and December 2020 and January and February 2021, looting and destruction Hawzen Primary Hospital by the Eritrean Defence Force (EDF), and the establishment of a rape camp in the hospital by the Ethiopian National Defense Forces (ENDF).
The EHRC–OHCHR Tigray investigation is a human rights investigation launched jointly by the Ethiopian Human Rights Commission (EHRC) and the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) in mid-2021 into human rights violations of the Tigray War that started in November 2020. The EHRC–OHCHR joint investigation team's report was published on 3 November 2021.
The Humera massacre was an ethnic mass murder event carried out in November 2020 in the town of Humera in the Tigray Region of northwestern Ethiopia, next to the Sudanese border. The massacre took place during an armed conflict between the regional government of Tigray and the federal government of Ethiopia. Refugees attributed the massacre to Amhara militias, including Fano, and the Ethiopian National Defense Force (ENDF).
Detention centres in Libya are criminal enterprises run by gangs of human traffickers and kidnappers for profit. Lawlessness in Libya has resulted in circumstances where criminals gangs abduct and detain people who are migrating to or through Libya. 5,000 migrants are held in dozens of camps that are mostly located around Bani Walid. Detainees often suffer torture and may face execution if their family do not pay ransoms to the gangs.
The Ethiopian federal constitution (1995–present) formalizes an ethnic federalism intended to undermine long-standing ethnic imperial rule, alleviate ethnic tensions, promote regional autonomy, and uphold unconditional rights of self-determination and secession, in a state that contains over 80 ethnic groups. But it is controversial, both with Ethiopian nationalists, who regard it as undermining central authority and promoting ethnic tension and with ethnic federalists, for whom the unfolding of its under-defined elements may add up to authoritarian centralisation or even continued minority ethnic hegemony. Parliamentary elections since 1995 have taken place every five years since enactment. All but one of these have resulted in government by members of the Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) political coalition, under three prime ministers. The EPRDF was under the effective control of the Tigrean People's Liberation Front (TPLF), which represents a small ethnic minority. In 2019 the EPDRF, under Abiy, was dissolved and he inaugurated the pan-ethnic Prosperity Party which won the 2021 Ethiopian Election, returning him as prime minister. But both political entities were different kinds of responses to the ongoing tension between constitutional ethnic federalism and the Ethiopian state's authority. Over the same period, and all administrations, a range of major conflicts with ethnic roots have occurred or continued, and the press and availability of information have been controlled. There has also been dramatic economic growth and liberalisation, which has itself been attributed to, and used to justify authoritarian state policy.
Meron Estefanos is a Swedish-Eritrean human rights activist and journalist. She first became known in the Eritrean refugee community in 2011 for helping those, who had been kidnapped and tortured by human traffickers on their way to Israel in order to extort ransom money from their relatives, exemplified in the 2013 documentary film Sound of Torture. After the migrant and trafficking routes changed to Libya, her efforts continued and uncovered criminal networks reaching into Europe. As of 2022, Estefanos deplored that no traffickers had been brought to justice, with little interest from national governments and international organisations.
References
- 1 2 "How Did One of North Africa's Biggest Human Traffickers Escape Prison?". www.vice.com. Retrieved 2021-05-08.
- ↑ "Así se fugó Kidane, uno de los traficantes de personas más crueles de África | Internacional". Todonoticia.cl (in Spanish). 2021-03-01. Retrieved 2021-05-08.
- ↑ "Migrations. "Walid", l'un des pires trafiquants d'êtres humains en Afrique, condamné en Éthiopie". Courrier international (in French). 2021-05-07. Retrieved 2021-05-08.
- ↑ Hayden, Sally. "People trafficking: 'They were killers. They have raped many women'". The Irish Times . Retrieved 2021-05-08.
- ↑ Girma, Kaleab; Hayden, Sally (30 April 2021). "'Cruel' trafficker accused of torturing refugees found guilty in Ethiopia". The Guardian . Retrieved 8 May 2021.
- ↑ "Alleged Eritrean People Smuggler Appears in Dutch Court". US News. 2023-01-10.
 | This article needs additional or more specific categories .(May 2021) |
 | This biographical article related to crime is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it. |
  | This Eritrean biographical article is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it. |