Human Rights Watch World Report 2012: Ethiopia

Discrimination in Government Services
In October 2010 Human Rights Watch published Development without Freedom: How Aid Underwrites Repression in Ethiopia, a report which documented discrimination in the administration of foreign donor-funded government services, including agricultural assistance, food-for-work programs, educational training opportunities, and civil-service reform programs. The report also showed how donor-funded facilities, such as schools and teacher training colleges, underwrite the indoctrination of civil servants and school children in political propaganda. Human Rights Watch’s research suggested that donors in the Development Assistance Group (DAG), including the US, Canada, the United Kingdom, and the European Union, were aware of such allegations, but were taking insufficient steps to investigate the misuse of their aid money.
DAG denied that aid was politicized, citing as evidence a UK Department for International Development-led report, “The Aid Management and Utilization Study,” which concluded that existing monitoring mechanisms would not detect politicization if it were occurring. That report also promised a second phase, a field investigation, which it said was crucial to establishing whether or not politicization was occurring on a broad scale. In April 2011 DAG told Human Rights Watch that this second phase, the field investigation, had been cancelled. A 2009 US diplomatic cable released by WikiLeaks said that the US embassy in Ethiopia was “keenly aware that foreign assistance … is vulnerable to politicization,” but that monitoring the problem, “risks putting the assistance programs themselves in jeopardy from a ruling party that has become confident that its vast patronage system is largely invulnerable.”
Key International Actors
International donor assistance continues to pour into Ethiopia, one of the world’s largest recipients of aid, but this has not resulted in greater international influence in ensuring government compliance with its human rights obligations. Conversely, donors appear to be reluctant to criticize the Ethiopian government’s human rights record so as not to endanger the continuity of their assistance programs.
Nonetheless, government spending remains hugely reliant (between 30 and 40 percent) on foreign assistance, and donors retain significant leverage that they could use to greater effect to insist on basic measures, such as the repeal or amendment of the Charities and Societies Proclamation and the Anti-Terrorism Proclamation, admission of UN special rapporteurs on human rights, the release of political prisoners, and better monitoring of foreign-funded programs to make sure they are not being used to bolster the ruling party.