Ethiopia Anti-Gay Bill Expected to Pass Next Week

Ethiopia is joining an increasing number of African countries that are hardening anti-gay laws that affect their gay and lesbian citizens. Last week a bill was endorsed by Ethiopia’s Council of Ministers, making homosexual acts “unpardonable.” This bill is expected to be passed quickly when it is brought to a vote next week.

In Ethiopia, sexual same-gender acts are illegal and punishable with up to 15 years in prison. The jail term is 25 years if someone convicted of this felony also infects another person with HIV. A pardon is granted to thousands of prisoners every year on the Ethiopian New Year. However, if the new law is approved, the president will no longer have the power to carry out these pardons.

Ostensibly to derail negative comments, the head of the Ethiopian Human Rights Commission, Mr. Tiruneh Zena, said that a pardon is a privilege, not a right. Therefore he says that passing the bill would not be harmful to gays and lesbians, and he stated that it should not affect the LGBT community in any significant way.

Ethiopia Thirty-eight countries in Africa criminalize homosexuality – approximately 70 percent of the continent. Imprisonment for same-sex acts is currently the law in Morocco, Algeria, Libya, Egypt, Senegal, Guinea, Ghana, parts of Nigeria, Cameroon, South Sudan, Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Zambia, Zimbabwe, and Namibia, as well as Ethiopia. The death penalty for gay acts is the law in Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Sudan, parts of Nigeria, Mauritania, and parts of Somalia. Only Mali, Burkina Faso, Central African Republic, and South Africa consider homosexual acts legal, and in South Africa, it is in fact legal to marry a same-sex spouse. The other African nations have contradictory laws, for example, in Angola there are laws against discrimination, but people are jailed for homosexual acts.

Anti-gay sentiment and legislation is becoming more prominent throughout Africa. In Ethiopia, homosexuality is not discussed openly – not even by human rights groups. Passing the new bill next week would make the topic more openly discussed and expectations would change in this country within the Horn of Africa. (The Horn of Africa is a peninsula in North East Africa that extends hundreds of miles into the Arabian Sea.)

Ethiopia’s minister for women, children and youth affairs, Zenebu Tadesse, received criticism on social media for a Twitter post attributed to her that denounced Uganda’s recent harsh anti-gay law. She responded that her Twitter account had been hacked and the views were not her own. However, immediately after the Tweet was posted, her Twitter account was removed.

Ethiopia

Mr. Gay World featured two black African men for the first time ever; they were from Namibia and Ethiopia.

On the other side of the coin, just two years ago, Mr. Gay World featured two black African men for the first time ever; they were from Namibia and Ethiopia. The purpose of the annual competition is both to champion gay rights and to empower homosexual men. The Ethiopian winner, 24-year-old Robel Hailu, has taken an enormous risk in participating in the South African event. In fact, his family found out about their son’s sexual orientation through media reports and has subsequently cut him off completely. While Hailu expected negative reactions, he didn’t expect that his family would disown him. He is a student in South Africa and now feels that he can never return home. He is fortified by the traumatic situation, however, saying that he now wants to speak out about how painful it is to be gay in Ethiopia.

Ethiopia

Dr. Dagmawi Woubshet is Ethiopia’s first openly gay Ethiopian professor. He made the list of the ten best professors at Cornell University in New York, where he teaches.

Another gay Ethiopian man, Dr. Dagmawi Woubshet is Ethiopia’s first openly gay Ethiopian professor. He made the list of the ten best professors at Cornell University in New York, where he teaches. His students claim what a fair professor he is, and that, while he gives them difficult questions to ponder in class and through homework, he is dedicated and one of the best professors they have ever had.

The Foundation of International Human Rights Law is the human rights statement created through the aforementioned Ethiopian Human Rights Commission. The law speaks of the commitment to human rights in the form of principles, agreements, and domestic law, and includes guaranteed protection for all manner of human rights expressions.

The human rights law expressly states the importance of universal values and the inherent importance of human rights to the entire international community. The law includes fairness, universality, and non-discrimination, applied to everyone, everywhere and always. It speaks of how the entire community belongs to Ethiopia, including African women, men, children, youth, elderly; those living with HIV/AIDS and those with disabilities, both rural and city-dwellers. It continues that, even more than ever before, in a world that faces the threat of divides along racial, economic, and religious lines, these universal principles must be defended: equality, fairness, and justice for all people across all boundaries. It is unclear how the human rights law would work in tandem with the anti-gay bill that imprisons people for same-sex acts without any hope expected of pardon. After next week the country will see the results.

By Fern Remedi-Brown

HRW: Foreign Technology Used to Spy on Ethiopian Opposition inside Country, Abroad

Ethiopia: Telecom Surveillance Chills Rights
Foreign Technology Used to Spy on Opposition inside Country, Abroad

(Berlin, March 25, 2014) – The Ethiopian government is using foreign technology to bolster its widespread telecom surveillance of opposition activists and journalists both in Ethiopia and abroad, Human Rights Watch said in a report released today.

The 100-page report, “‘They Know Everything We Do’: Telecom and Internet Surveillance in Ethiopia,” details the technologies the Ethiopian government has acquired from several countries and uses to facilitate surveillance of perceived political opponents inside the country and among the diaspora. The government’s surveillance practices violate the rights to freedom of expression, association, and access to information. The government’s monopoly over all mobile and Internet services through its sole, state-owned telecom operator, Ethio Telecom, facilitates abuse of surveillance powers.

“The Ethiopian government is using control of its telecom system as a tool to silence dissenting voices,” said Arvind Ganesan, business and human rights director at Human Rights Watch. “The foreign firms that are providing products and services that facilitate Ethiopia’s illegal surveillance are risking complicity in rights abuses.”

The report draws on more than 100 interviews with victims of abuses and former intelligence officials in Ethiopia and 10 other countries between September 2012 and February 2014. Because of the government’s complete control over the telecom system, Ethiopian security officials have virtually unlimited access to the call records of all telephone users in Ethiopia. They regularly and easily record phone calls without any legal process or oversight.

Recorded phone calls with family members and friends – particularly those with foreign phone numbers – are often played during abusive interrogations in which people who have been arbitrarily detained are accused of belonging to banned organizations. Mobile networks have been shut down during peaceful protests and protesters’ locations have been identified using information from their mobile phones.

A former opposition party member told Human Rights Watch: “One day they arrested me and they showed me everything. They showed me a list of all my phone calls and they played a conversation I had with my brother. They arrested me because we talked about politics on the phone. It was the first phone I ever owned, and I thought I could finally talk freely.”

The government has curtailed access to information by blocking websites that offer any independent or critical analysis of political events in Ethiopia. In-country testing that Human Rights Watch and Citizen Lab, a University of Toronto research center focusing on internet security and rights, carried out in 2013 showed that Ethiopia continues to block websites of opposition groups, media sites, and bloggers. In a country where there is little in the way of an independent media, access to such information is critical.

Ethiopian authorities using mobile surveillance have frequently targeted the ethnic Oromo population. Taped phone calls have been used to compel people in custody to confess to being part of banned groups, such as the Oromo Liberation Front, which seeks greater autonomy for the Oromo people, or to provide information about members of these groups. Intercepted emails and phone calls have been submitted as evidence in trials under the country’s flawed anti-terrorism law, without indication that judicial warrants were obtained.

The authorities have also detained and interrogated people who received calls from phone numbers outside of Ethiopia that may not be in Ethio Telecom databases. As a result, many Ethiopians, particularly in rural areas, are afraid to call or receive phone calls from abroad, a particular problem for a country that has many nationals working in foreign countries.

Most of the technologies used to monitor telecom activity in Ethiopia have been provided by the Chinese telecom giant ZTE, which has been in the country since at least 2000 and was its exclusive supplier of telecom equipment from 2006 to 2009. ZTE is a major player in the African and global telecom industry, and continues to have a key role in the development of Ethiopia’s fledgling telecom network. ZTE has not responded to Human Rights Watch inquiries about whether it is taking steps to address and prevent human rights abuses linked to unlawful mobile surveillance in Ethiopia.

Several European companies have also provided advanced surveillance technology to Ethiopia, which have been used to target members of the diaspora. Ethiopia appears to have acquired and used United Kingdom and Germany-based Gamma International’s FinFisher and Italy-based Hacking Team’s Remote Control System. These tools give security and intelligence agencies access to files, information, and activity on the infected target’s computer. They can log keystrokes and passwords and turn on a device’s webcam and microphone, effectively turning a computer into a listening device. Ethiopians living in the UK, United States, Norway, and Switzerland are among those known to have been infected with this software, and cases have been brought in the US and UK alleging illegal wiretapping. One Skype conversation gleaned from the computers of infected Ethiopians has appeared on pro-government websites.

Gamma has not responded to Human Rights Watch inquiries as to whether it has any meaningful process in place to restrict the use or sale of these products to governments with poor human rights records. While Hacking Team applies certain precautions to limit abuse of its products, it has not confirmed whether and how those precautions applied to sales to the Ethiopian government.

“Ethiopia’s use of foreign technologies to target opposition members abroad is a deeply troubling example of this unregulated global trade, creating serious risks of abuse,” Ganesan said. “The makers of these tools should take immediate steps to address their misuse; including investigating the use of these tools to target the Ethiopian diaspora and addressing the human rights impact of their Ethiopia operations.”

Such powerful spyware remains virtually unregulated at the global level and there are insufficient national controls or limits on their export, Human Rights Watch said. In 2013, rights groups filed a complaint at the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development alleging such technologies had been deployed to target activists in Bahrain, and Citizen Lab has found evidence of use of these tools in over 25 countries.

The internationally protected rights to privacy, and freedom of expression, information, and association are enshrined in the Ethiopian constitution. However, Ethiopia either lacks or ignores judicial and legislative mechanisms to protect people from unlawful government surveillance. This danger is made worse by the widespread use of torture and other ill-treatment against political detainees in Ethiopian detention centers.

The extent of Ethiopia’s use of surveillance technologies may be limited by capacity issues and a lack of trust among key government ministries, Human Rights Watch said. But as capacity increases, Ethiopians may increasingly see far more pervasive unlawful use of mobile and email surveillance.

The government’s actual control is exacerbated by the perception among many Ethiopians that government surveillance is omnipresent, resulting in considerable self-censorship, with Ethiopians refraining from openly communicating on a variety of topics across telecom networks. Self-censorship is especially common in rural Ethiopia, where mobile phone coverage and access to the Internet is very limited. The main mode of government control is through extensive networks of informants and a grassroots system of surveillance. This rural legacy means that many rural Ethiopians view mobile phones and other telecommunications technologies as just another tool to monitor them, Human Rights Watch found.

“As Ethiopia’s telecom system grows, there is an increasing need to ensure that proper legal protections are followed and that security officials don’t have unfettered access to people’s private communications,” Ganesan said. “Adoption of Internet and mobile technologies should support democracy, facilitating the spread of ideas and opinions and access to information, rather than being used to stifle people’s rights.”

“‘They Know Everything We Do’: Telecom and Internet Surveillance in Ethiopia,” is available at:
http://hrw.org/node/123977

For more Human Rights Watch reporting on Ethiopia and the Anti-Terrorism Proclamation, please visit:
http://www.hrw.org/africa/ethiopia

For more Human Rights Watch reporting on Internet freedom, please visit:
http://www.hrw.org/topic/free-speech/internet-freedom