Your World of Legal Intelligence
 United Kingdom | +44 (0) 20 7284 8080

Balancing Between Empowerment and Inclusion: Multinational Federalism and Citizenship Rights in Ethiopia

Document Cited in Related
Vincent
DOI10.3366/ajicl.2019.0292
Date01 November 2019
Pages588-608
Published date01 November 2019
INTRODUCTION

Since the early 1990s, Ethiopia has been developing a federal state system which mainly aims at the accommodation of the country's significant ethnic diversity. Although the Ethiopian state is not the result of a European-induced process of state formation, the challenge of forging ties of citizenship between the country's linguistically, culturally and religiously diverse people has been as strong as in other African countries whose boundaries are the result of arbitrary colonial designs. For the largest part of the twentieth century, consecutive Ethiopian rulers attempted to strengthen the allegiance of the population to an Ethiopian ‘nation’ by developing a centralised administrative structure and by pursuing assimilationist policies. Similar nation-building policies were introduced in most post-independence African countries. Such an approach was initially supported by international law, which, abhorred by the racial categorisations and concomitant atrocities of the Nazi regime, was reluctant to grant rights to a nation's sub-groups (such as ethnic minorities) and instead emphasised the protection of individual rights. Yet, as innumerable tensions and conflicts on the African continent – and beyond – have illustrated, such policies have not been able to achieve their purported objective of forging strong ties of citizenship that support societal harmony and state unity. The same is true for Ethiopia where the ‘homogenising’ nation-building policies contributed to civil strife and even a full-fledged civil war bringing the country to the brink of disintegration. The inadequacy or – in some cases – outright failure of assimilationist nation building has prompted both international law and the Ethiopian state to adopt more accommodationist approaches. Increasingly, international law, at both global/UN and regional/continental levels, emphasises the importance of group-specific/group rights as complementary to the classical universal individual rights. In this regard, one can mention the 1992 UN Minority Declaration, the 2007 UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, the 1995 Council of Europe Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities and the jurisprudence of the African Commission on Human and Peoples' Rights extending the interpretation of ‘People’ in the Charter to a country's population sub-groups.1 The new Ethiopian government, which assumed power after the defeat of a Marxist regime in 1991, similarly embarked on a new nation- and state-building path, which acknowledged the ethnic diversity of the Ethiopian population and institutionalised it through the establishment of an ethnic-based decentralised state structure. The decentralisation process culminated in the establishment of a fully-fledged federal structure by a new constitution in 1995. This constitution distributes state competences between the federal government and nine regional states whose boundaries are drawn from the perspective of diversity accommodation. The basic idea underpinning this arrangement is that societal harmony and state stability in Ethiopia can best be guaranteed by empowering the various ethnic groups through endowing them with self-rule in their ‘own’ region while at the same time ensuring their participation in shared rule at the federal level. The premise emanating from the constitution is that all ethnic groups have a ‘motherland’ (a ‘contiguous territory’ in constitutional parlance) and that achieving an overlap between this motherland and the regional boundaries is a feasible objective. Yet the reality on the ground is quite different and increasingly so. All nine regions of the federation are multi-ethnic – although the degree of ethnic pluralism displays significant variations from region to region – and inter-regional migratory movements are further fuelling this reality. The lack of correspondence between regional and ethnic boundaries is generating serious challenges affecting intra-regional as well as inter-regional harmony and any failure to address these challenges entails severe risks for the viability and sustainability of the federal system. One of the major problems revolves around the tension between the empowerment of ethnic groups – which the federal system is set to guarantee – and the rights of individuals who do not belong to the regionally empowered groups but who are Ethiopian citizens nevertheless. The core argument submitted here is that a reduction of this tension requires the Ethiopian state to strike a balance between these two potentially competing objectives of group empowerment and protection of citizenship. Such balance will strengthen regional political and societal integration and reduce the significant conflict potential of the current zero-sum state of affairs. This article aims to outline a number of legal instruments that could arguably contribute to this delicate balancing act. It will not do that by prescribing abstract theoretical mechanisms, but by building on and developing what already exists in the Ethiopian constitutional and institutional framework, although sometimes only in embryonic form. Indeed, the existing legal framework contains a wide range of mechanisms that could prove to be particularly useful for accommodating intra-regional diversity, but have not been given sufficient attention or whose effectiveness is inhibited by structural flaws. The next section of the article sets the background to the study by outlining the ethnic configuration of Ethiopia's population at both country-wide and regional level. Section III focuses on the existing legal mechanisms of ethnic empowerment whereas section IV discusses their impact upon the rights of citizens belonging to ‘non-empowered’ groups. Acknowledging the tension between ethnic empowerment and citizenship rights and attempting to avert a conflict-prone zero-sum situation, section V offers a number of recommendations that should contribute to a more optimal balance between empowerment and inclusive citizenship.

 ETHNIC-BASED REGIONAL STATES WITH MULTI-ETHNIC POPULATIONS The Ethnic Basis of the Regional States

As can be observed from the list included in the latest Ethiopian Population and Housing Census of 2007, the country's population is composed of more than eighty ethnic groups or, to use the constitutional vernacular, ‘nations, nationalities and peoples’. Yet, about three-fourths of the country's population is formed by just four groups: the Oromo who constitute 34.5 per cent of the total population, the Amhara (26.9 per cent), the Somali (6.2 per cent) and the Tigray (6.1 per cent). All other groups each account for less than 5 per cent.2 Hence, from a numerical perspective, all Ethiopia's ethnic groups find themselves in a minority position vis-à-vis the rest of the population. Furthermore, since all ethnic groups are endowed with ‘sovereign power’ (Article 8 of the Constitution), the Constitution does not create any hierarchy between them. Both observations – their numerical size and their equal constitutional status proscribing hierarchical power relationships – warrants the designation of all Ethiopia's ethnic groups as minorities. Hence, when Article 39 enumerates rights of nations, nationalities and peoples, it is in fact enshrining minority rights. Indeed, one of the most notable features of the 1995 Ethiopian federal constitution is its inclusion of extensive ethnic minority rights encompassed under the heading of the ‘right to self-determination’ embedded in Article 39. Article 39 grants all ‘nations, nationalities and peoples in Ethiopia’ internationally recognised ethnic minority rights such as language rights and cultural rights as well as the right to political representation.3 Yet, the Constitution goes beyond the international ‘acquis’ and additionally offers all ethnic groups the right to territorial self-rule (even including secession) whereas international law reserves the right to territorial self-rule for the specific category of ‘indigenous peoples’.4 The right to self-determination is the constitutional foundation of the federal compound in the sense that the federal structure is designed to fulfil this right. This entails that the nine regional states/regions established by Article 47 of the Ethiopian Constitution are intended to constitute the forum where and through which the ethnic groups can exercise the different components of their right to self-determination. The nine regional states are: the states of Tigray, Afar, Amhara, Oromia, Somali, Benishangul-Gumuz, the state of the Southern Nations, Nationalities and Peoples (hereafter the Southern region), Gambella, and the state of the Harari people. The names of the regions already shed some light on their ethnic composition. The names of the first five regions, for instance, refer to the ethnic groups that constitute the numerical majority in them. The state of the Harari people refers to the ethnic group that is politically empowered though not numerically dominant in the region. The Benishangul-Gumuz region refers to two ethnic groups: the Benishangul (or Berta) and the Gumuz. The name of the Southern region is reflective of the regional population's substantive ethnic pluralism whereas Gambella is a mere geographical reference. The five ethnic groups that are numerically dominant at the regional level simultaneously control the respective regional governments. This implies that these groups, which constitute country-wide minorities, have assumed majority status at the regional level. Yet, as pointed out above, one of the basic principles emanating from the constitution is inter-ethnic equality: all ethnic groups have sovereign power and all of them have an identical right to self-determination. This constitutes the rationale behind the constitutional provision of Article 47(2), which stipulates that nations, nationalities and peoples within the nine regions have the right to...

To continue reading

Request your trial

VLEX uses login cookies to provide you with a better browsing experience. If you click on 'Accept' or continue browsing this site we consider that you accept our cookie policy. ACCEPT