Ethiopia accused of committing genocide during Tigray war — report

There is a compelling evidence that Ethiopia and its military allies committed genocidal acts against Tigrayans during the two-year armed conflict in the Horn of Africa country, a new report has concluded.

Published on Tuesday (4 May) by the US-based New Lines Institute, the 120-page report quotes multiple, widespread and credible independent accounts that Ethiopian forces and their allies carried out “acts constituting the crime of genocide” during the deadliest armed conflict of this century, which ran between 2020-22. The authors accuse Ethiopia and its allies of violating the Genocide Convention after invading the region in November 2020 in that they had a clear ‘intent to destroy Tigrayans as an ethnic group’, and thus call for the country to be brought before the International Court of Justice (ICJ).

It is the first comprehensive study to cite Ethiopia’s obligations as a signatory of the Genocide Convention, the international treaty that was recently evoked by South Africa at the ICJ hearings in a bid to halt Israel’s military offensive in Gaza. The report calls on governments worldwide to take action against Ethiopia and other perpetrators, including by launching criminal investigations and other proceedings at The Hague-based ICJ. The Tigray war erupted in in late 2020 when the Ethiopian armed forces moved into the country’s northern Tigray region in a bid to crush an autonomy movement by the regional government.