The Quest for Minority Rights in Federal Ethiopia: Legal Promise and Challenges

Abstract

Ethiopia has adopted ethnic-based federal system as a response to National Questions in the country during the reign of EPRDF regime. As this federal system is based on ethnicity, ethnic identity has become the key instrument regarding entitlement, representation and state organization. Now, the key to get access to the resources of the state is to acquire a separate ethnic identity and an ethnically defined administrative structure.
 Based on the analytical literature review, the study has examined the challenges posed by ethnic-based federal system to protect the rights of minority groups and individuals residing within ethnically designated regional states. The federal system has created its own types of political challenges for the protections of the rights of non-indigenous minority groups. It is constraining rather than enlarging the political space for an overall citizenship. The idea of overarching citizenship that transcends ethnic identity is lacking in the federal system. The ethnic federal system also lacks mechanism for monitoring human rights at ethnically designated sub-state levels. The study, therefore, suggest reformulating the federal system, strictly respecting the principles of the federal constitution and revisiting regional state constitutions to avoid contradiction to the supreme federal constitution.