As if on cue to confirm the validity and urgency of this intervention, Ethiopia’s parliament this week passed the Charities and Societies Proclamation in an effort to stifle civil society activities and restrict international partners’ ability to support Ethiopia’s non-governmental sector. “This law goes far beyond any normal effort to regulate civil society,” said Leslie Lefkow, a researcher with the New York-based Human Rights Watch. “It’s really an instrument of repression.”
The new regulations will prevent NGOs that receive over 10 percent of funding from foreign sources from engaging in activities in the fields of human rights, gender equality, children’s rights, disabled rights, conflict resolution, judicial strengthening and law enforcement. A newly-established Charities and Societies Agency will enjoy wide discretion to regulate civil society groups.
The law is designed to disable civil society and undermine democratic space, argues CIVICUS, the international civil society alliance.
The provisions amount to an attempt to “conceal human rights violations, stifle critics and prevent public protest of its actions ahead of expected elections in 2010,” Amnesty International suggests.
Regulations governing the NGO registration process are already vague, leaving considerable discretion to registration officials. “Consequently, NGOs have had difficulty registering, experiencing long delays, repeated requests for information, and in some cases denial,” the Defending Civil Society report states.
The U.S. State Department expressed its concern that the law may constrain official U.S. assistance, particularly on promoting democracy and good governance, civic and human rights, conflict resolution, and advocacy for Ethiopia’s most vulnerable groups, precisely those areas that Addis Ababa deems critical for development.
The Ethiopian Human Rights Council will be hit by the new law. The council has over the past 17 years issued dozens of reports detailing human rights abuses, including executions and disappearances. Foreign sources account for virtually all of group’s four million birr ($400,000) annual budget, including the National Endowment for Democracy, and European embassies. The new law is likely to mean that many of the group’s 60 investigators and administrators will lose their jobs.
Wish to revive and accept the majority of the people in ethopia.
Civil Society in Ethopia: Together they can do more, this is the key solution, networking and solidarity.
Abdullahi Nur
Civil Society Activist and Nonviolent Conflict RP
Horn of Africa
Somalia
This is big shame for the Etchiopian Government and Parliament. The AU and UN bbodies in Addis should engage urgently in discussion for the review of this law and ADF should start an online discussion to find a way reinforcing the role of Etchipian NGOS.Let workd together,the change is possible.
Franck Kamunga and I were in Ethiopia in October at an event we though Civil Society should have played an important role to provide local perspectives; we were wrong, they were not. True enough this law is intended to narrow the democratic space, and ADF must try to work along with the ‘voices within’ to bring greater international attention to the issue.
Civil Society organizations are quite different from political parties; they don’t seek to get state power through advocacy, rather to improve the use of it, so targeting civil society in such a way that wean its influence is even detrimental to the ‘power that be’, because any power that is unchecked becomes a source of evil even unto itself.
But change is possible with concerted efforts, let us not despair.