Ethiopia Shelved Justice for Tigray's Victims Without Saying Why

Ask a Tigrayan mother who lost a son in 2020 what transitional justice means, and she will not give you a policy definition. She will ask whether anyone will ever be held to account for the killing. For her, the question is not academic. It is the difference between a country that buries its dead and one that buries the truth with them.

In April 2025, Ethiopia's transitional justice process simply stopped. No official reason was given. Draft laws that were days from public consultation were shelved. Donors, victims, and civil society were left guessing, and in a country still healing from one of the deadliest conflicts of this century, guessing is dangerous. On 23 October, the Ministry of Justice relaunched the process with a government-civil society platform and an active website. We should welcome that. But a relaunch is not a remedy, and an unexplained pause is not a policy. Let us be clear about what has happened and what must follow.

The facts are these. The National Dialogue Commission submitted its recommendations to Parliament on 3 October. Those recommendations remain unpublished. The government has therefore resumed a justice process while keeping the document that could reshape it locked in a drawer. Ask yourself what it means for a state to resume work on the future of its own people without showing them the blueprint. Then ask who benefits from that secrecy.

The gaps are wider still. The Transitional Justice Policy did not clearly settle which institution resolves legal disputes between transitional justice bodies. Accountability for crimes allegedly committed by foreign forces, most notably Eritrean troops during the 2020 to 2022 Tigray war, remains insufficiently addressed. Mental health and psychosocial support have been pushed under the reparations pillar, where they are almost invisible, and only a handful of civil society organisations are carrying the burden of healing. Economic, social and cultural rights violations have barely featured in the framework, even though the policies of economic ministries may have helped create the very grievances the process is meant to resolve.

The process also failed the people it was built for. Dedicated consultations with youth, the diaspora, and vulnerable or underrepresented groups never happened. The coordination mechanism promised in the policy was never created. The 2024 implementation roadmap called for an interim, multi-stakeholder body to guide and monitor progress, and that body still does not exist. Its absence, according to the analysis from the Institute for Security Studies, contributed directly to the misunderstandings between the dialogue and transitional justice processes that preceded the pause. A promise on paper that was never built is a broken promise with a formal signature.

Meanwhile, the institutional landscape moved without Addis Ababa's coordination. A commission in the Somali Region advanced its own work on violence and reconciliation. The Commission of Inquiry on the Tigray conflict released its findings during the pause. Thousands of customary courts operate across several regions, and the new criminal procedure and evidence code opens the door to a formal relationship with traditional justice. Yet the national framework says little about how any of this fits together. Findings exist. Mechanisms exist. What is missing is the political will to connect them into a single system that victims can trust.

Africa has seen this movie before, and it rarely ends well. Too many of our governments treat transitional justice as a performance for foreign donors, switching it on when the cameras are rolling and off when the findings become inconvenient. The pattern is familiar across the continent: commissions appointed, reports written, recommendations buried, and perpetrators promoted. Reconciliation without accountability is not reconciliation. It is amnesia imposed by the powerful on the powerless.

We do not have to accept that outcome. South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission, for all its imperfections, published its full findings, including material that embarrassed the state and its institutions. That openness is precisely what gave its process legitimacy. Sierra Leone combined a truth commission with a hybrid court, and it showed that a nation can prosecute its worst offenders while rebuilding its institutions. These are the standards Ethiopia should be measured against, not the convenient silence of a stalled ministry.

So here is what must happen. The National Dialogue Commission's recommendations must be published in full, with a clear timeline for their review, within weeks rather than months. The Ministry of Justice should establish the interim, multi-stakeholder monitoring body that the 2024 roadmap demanded, with a published mandate, a budget, and representation from civil society, victims' groups, and independent legal experts. Independent experts must sit alongside ministry officials in drafting the laws, and the draft legislation should be released well before consultations begin, so that citizens can read it, challenge it, and improve it.

Parliament must move from spectator to overseer. Lawmakers should hold public hearings on the dialogue's recommendations and require regular reporting on progress. The African Union, through its own transitional justice policy and the African Commission on Human and Peoples' Rights, should engage openly rather than quietly, and it should press for accountability for crimes attributed to Eritrean forces. Silence on that front is not neutrality. It is complicity with impunity.

Civil society must be free to organise, monitor, and criticise without needing a government-approved badge. Access to information cannot depend on membership in a platform the Justice Ministry controls. Youth groups, diaspora communities, and survivors of every community in Ethiopia, including those displaced by ongoing conflicts, must have guaranteed seats at the table and real opportunities to be heard.

Our continent does not need another commission gathering dust. It needs a justice process that survives changes in government, answers to Parliament, and treats the truth as a public asset rather than a political liability. Ethiopia's people have waited long enough. Demand the recommendations now. Demand the timeline now. Demand that the Tigray dead and the Ethiopian living both get the same thing: the truth, and the justice that follows it.

Based on reporting by ISS