Insights on Ethiopia’s State of Emergency against COVID-19: A Descriptive Overview (preprint)
Edilu Dikale · SSRN Electronic Journal · 2021
Ethiopia confirmed its first COVID-19 case on March 13, 2020. At the moment of writing, (11 August 2020), over 24, 000 cases of COVID-19 are confirmed and the pandemic is rising at an unprecedented rate. Ethiopia has started taking various legal and informal measures prior to its first confirmation announcement on March 13, 2020 and since then. Among others, Ethiopia set up the Ministerial Committee led by the PM on February 29 and the committee gave a press release on March 16 announcing a postponement of ‘large gatherings and meetings including a sporting event, limiting religious institutions and places of worship to limit gatherings and closure of all public and private schools except higher learning (HI) and later on the HI was also totally closed to combat the crisis. The committee announced that the security sector to enforce measures of ceasing large gatherings to maintain social distancing’ on 23 March. Similar measures were also taken by Amhara, Southern, and Oromia regional states among the nine member states of the Ethiopian federation though without legal gazette publication. On the top of that State of Tigray declared a State of Emergency (SoE) on March 25, 2020. In a similar vein, the federal government declared SoE by the Council of Ministers (CoM) on April 8, followed by the approval of the House of Peoples Representative (HPR) on April 13, 2020. Subsequently, the Council of Ministers also adopted its implementation regulation. But the implications of these measures on human rights and freedoms, social, economic, and political rights of the public were not strictly thought and studied. Thus, the main objective of this piece was to investigate the implications of the above measures on human rights and rule of law principles. Accordingly, it sheds some light on the substantive and procedural content of SoE in light of legality principle, proportionality, and transparency, the competence of government’s power at a different level to mention the least in contrast to measures taken in various jurisdictions.