Addis Abeba — The U.S. State Department’s newly released 2024 Country Report on Human Rights Practices in Ethiopia reads like a haunting déjà vu. For the fifth consecutive year, Washington has cataloged the same grim realities: extrajudicial killings, mass displacement, arbitrary detention, torture, sexual violence as a weapon of war, and the suffocation of civic space. The details shift with each annual publication, but the narrative arc remains the same. Ethiopia’s crisis has not been cyclical–it has been sustained, engineered, and perfected into a system of governance. That raises a question with global implications: how long will the United States, its democratic allies, and the international financial institutions they influence continue to underwrite a regime that treats impunity as a governing principle?
The new report spares no detail in describing the scope of state-linked atrocities. In Amhara, Oromia, and Tigray, security forces and allied militias are implicated in mass killings and scorched-earth campaigns. Political opponents face arbitrary detention under the pretext of national security. Journalists are silenced by intimidation, detention, or forced exile. In its latest report published in August 2025, the Ethiopian Human Rights Commission has warned that both the transitional justice process and the national dialogue have become hollow performances, devoid of inclusivity or trust. Yet, while these warnings mount, foreign capitals continue to offer budgetary support, debt relief, and diplomatic legitimacy, insulating the government from meaningful consequences.
Ethiopia’s ruling elite has long perfected the art of crisis management as a political strategy. The current administration has gone further: it has turned the perpetual emergency into an “Impunity Machine” that not only survives crises but reproduces them to consolidate power. The war in Tigray and the militarized conflicts in Oromia and Amhara are not unfortunate policy failures; they are extensions of a political economy in which violence, ethnic fragmentation, and legal manipulation are levers for control. As the State Department report makes clear, Ethiopia’s human rights abuses are not the residue of instability–they are the architecture of the state itself.
Illusion of reform, reality of entrenchment
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In the early months of Abiy’s premiership, the narrative was one of reform: political prisoners released, peace with Eritrea signed, and press freedoms expanded. Those gains dissolved almost as quickly as they appeared. Today, Ethiopia stands as one of the most militarized states in Africa, with war economies feeding entrenched elites and silencing dissent. The recent amendments to the anti-money laundering law–presented as human rights-oriented reforms intended to combat money laundering and the financing of terrorism–nonetheless preserve broad and ambiguous powers that can be used to restrict political activity. Now, amendments to the Civil Society Proclamation threaten to further restrict NGOs, especially those working on human rights and governance.
These maneuvers are not mere hypotheticals. They fit into a pattern of deliberate institutional capture that has characterized Ethiopia’s political trajectory since 2018. The courts are increasingly pliant, the legislature functions as a rubber stamp, and the security sector answers to a narrow executive circle. For a state that the West still classifies as “transitional,” this is less a transition to democracy than a managed descent into a hybrid autocracy.
Ethiopia’s human rights abuses are not the residue of instability–they are the architecture of the state itself.”
Proponents of engagement argue that Ethiopia’s recent increase in foreign currency reserves, driven by monetary liberalization and new export revenues, signals a degree of economic stabilization. But this façade masks deepening inequalities. Recent reports suggest that the liberalization of the exchange rate has benefited exporters and the political-business elite while driving up the cost of living for the majority. Inflation remains stubbornly high, essential goods are increasingly out of reach for ordinary Ethiopians, and youth unemployment–already a driver of mass migration–shows no signs of abating.
The State Department report’s human rights findings cannot be divorced from this economic reality. The same government that claims credit for stabilizing macroeconomic indicators is waging costly, prolonged wars that divert resources from development to militarization. It is a war economy in the truest sense: one in which the survival of the ruling elite depends on the continuation of conflict, not its resolution.
This year’s State Department report is not an isolated assessment. The Physicians for Human Rights’ recent investigation into conflict-related sexual and reproductive violence in Ethiopia documents harrowing patterns of abuse–acts that, in many cases, meet the legal threshold for crimes against humanity. Survivors describe being told they will “never be able to give birth again,” a chilling articulation of intent to destroy communities at their core. In its latest report, Human Rights Watch further underscored that Ethiopia’s human rights situation “remained dire,” citing widespread violations by government forces, militias, and non-state armed groups in conflict-affected areas as well as other parts of the country.
Taken together, these reports form a body of evidence so comprehensive that denial is no longer plausible. The question is no longer whether atrocities have occurred, but whether the international community will continue to finance a state apparatus that commits them.
Five Scenarios, One Reality: Democracy on hold in Ethiopia
As Ethiopia approaches its next national election cycle, the political terrain suggests five plausible scenarios, none of which point to a credible democratic transition. First, a managed election under tight executive control, where opposition parties are fragmented, media access is restricted, and electoral bodies lack independence. In this scenario, the appearance of pluralism masks the certainty of ruling-party dominance–a model perfected in Ethiopia’s political past and adapted to current realities.
Second, the emergence of a new military-backed regime cloaked in electoral legitimacy. With large segments of the security sector now operating as political actors, a “civilian-led” government could serve as a veneer for direct military influence, ensuring continuity in policy and impunity in practice.
Third, escalation of Ethiopia’s regional geopolitical entanglements, particularly in the Horn of Africa’s volatile security environment. Border disputes, proxy conflicts, and competition over Nile waters could become pretexts for continued militarization at home, deepening domestic repression under the guise of national defense.
Fourth, the deepening of Ethiopia’s economic crisis, where the foreign currency cushion proves temporary and debt obligations mount. In such a scenario, austerity measures imposed by international lenders could further inflame social unrest, which the state would likely meet with increased coercion.
The impunity machine operates not in defiance of the international order, but in symbiosis with it.”
Fifth, the unresolved status of Tigray’s political representation in the federal system–now absent for nearly five years–fuels an acceleration of separatist sentiment. Without credible rehabilitation, reconstruction, and political dialogue, Tigray’s reintegration into Ethiopia will remain improbable, making the push for independence increasingly mainstream.
These scenarios are not mutually exclusive. In fact, the most likely trajectory is a hybrid of all five, producing a political order in which managed elections, military influence, economic precarity, and centrifugal separatism coexist under an umbrella of international recognition.
Here lies the central indictment: the impunity machine operates not in defiance of the international order, but in symbiosis with it. Western governments, multilateral lenders, and development agencies remain Ethiopia’s indispensable partners. Debt restructuring agreements, budgetary aid, and new project financing continue to flow, often with minimal conditionality on human rights or governance reforms.
The rationale is familiar–geostrategic importance, counterterrorism cooperation, refugee hosting. Yet this calculus ignores the lesson repeatedly demonstrated in Ethiopia: the absence of accountability for mass atrocities today all but guarantees their recurrence tomorrow. As long as Western support remains divorced from enforceable political conditions, the cycle will not only continue–it will deepen.
Prominent political theorists have long warned that authoritarian systems do not simply collapse under the weight of their contradictions; they adapt, co-opt, and endure. Hannah Arendt described this adaptability as the capacity of regimes to normalize extraordinary abuses until they become unremarkable. Ethiopia’s current government has achieved precisely this: turning war crimes into routine, repression into governance, and crisis into policy.
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Breaking Ethiopia’s cycle of impunity
Breaking the impunity machine will require a strategic shift in external engagement. This means conditioning financial assistance on verifiable human rights benchmarks, supporting genuinely independent electoral and judicial institutions, and empowering local civil society actors rather than sidelining them through restrictive laws. It also means acknowledging, rather than downplaying, the role of Ethiopian state actors in orchestrating atrocities.
The U.S. State Department’s latest report has once again placed the facts in plain sight. Furthermore, the findings of local and international human rights groups point to the same conclusion: Ethiopia is not in the throes of an accidental crisis but is governed by design through perpetual instability. As the next election approaches, the international community faces a binary choice–either disrupt the machinery of impunity or become complicit in its continued operation.
History will not absolve those who chose the latter. The pattern is clear, the evidence overwhelming, and the stakes–as millions remain displaced, silenced, or under siege–are too high for diplomatic equivocation. Ethiopia’s impunity machine can be dismantled, but only if the political will exists to see beyond the fictions of reform and confront the architecture of repression for what it is: deliberate, calculated, and entirely unsustainable. AS
Editor’s Note: Getachew GebrekirosTemare is a human rights defender and peacebuilding analyst with extensive expertise in human rights advocacy, peacebuilding, and conflict transformation focusing on the Horn of Africa. A trained lawyer and peacebuilding practitioner, he holds a master’s degree in conflict transformation from Eastern Mennonite University in Virginia, USA. Getachew can be reached at [email protected]
