WASHINGTON - It has been three years since the United Nations began investigating alleged human rights abuses in Eritrea. Earlier this year, the Commission of Inquiry presented its first report to the the U.N. Human Rights Council, describing arbitrary arrests, extrajudicial killings, disappearances and imprisonment without charge inside the East African country.
But Eritrea's government strongly rejected the report, and its findings have divided the global Eritrean diaspora.
In October 2012, Sheila Keetharuth of Mauritius was appointed as the to investigate claims that there were between political prisoners in Eritrea. Since then, Keetharuth’s work has expanded into a full commission with three members: herself, Chairman Mike Smith, and Victor Dankwa, an associate professor at the University of Ghana.
Keetharuth told VOA that her current focus as special rapporteur is on three issues: whether Eritreans have economic, social and cultural rights; whether Eritreans have rights to adequate housing; and most pressing, what is forcing tens of thousands of Eritreans, including many unaccompanied minors, to put their lives into the hands of smugglers and flee the country.
“Smuggling and trafficking are but the symptoms of a system where human rights violations still continue,” she said. “If people can’t go or have to use clandestine means to leave the country, and the level of human rights in the country is such that they would rather put their lives in the hands of traffickers and smugglers, then there is a big question in what is driving [them], what are the root causes?”
Investigators for the commission have never set foot inside Eritrea, and their findings are based solely on interviews with expatriates and other documents. Critics say the commission’s work is politically motivated, and that the people it quotes are lying.
When the report came out last June, Reuters reported that Eritreans supporting the government rallied outside the United Nations building in Geneva, Switzerland in protest. The situation was tense and some commission members had to be protected by the police.
Keetharuth says that it is not the controversial nature of the report that worries her, but the physical threats that follow. “I am very open to scrutiny and I am very happy that people have had the opportunity to discuss the report but when it gets to physical attack, then that’s a problem,” she said. Swiss police are currently investigating the incident.
Keetharuth has made numerous requests to travel to Eritrea, interview officials and gain access to prisons and other important sites. Her latest request was made on August 24 of this year and, like before, she received no reply.
“I don’t receive an answer to the letters I send,” she said. “But when I started on this job as special rapporteur, they said that the mandate was politically motivated and they would not agree to this kind of country specific review of the human rights council. That they would prefer the process [go] through the UPR, the Universal Periodic Review, which looks at the human rights record of each country.”
The permanent representative of Eritrea to the United Nations, Girma Asmerom, says his country has no incentive to cooperate with the commission, which he believes was created without “credible evidence” at the request of Eritrea’s hostile neighbors.
Fabricated testimony from asylum seekers and political enemies of Eritrea drive the commission's work, Girma says.
“It is redundant, waste of money and resources because the special rapporteur is part of the inquiry commission. You don’t interrogate your own report, so there’s not going to be a different report. And Wikileaks has leaked how Eritrea should be punished for its geopolitical location and not dancing to the tune of major powers who have an agenda of dominating the Horn of Africa," he says.
Girma acknowledged that people are fleeing Eritrea, but dismissed the idea they flee because of government policies. Instead, he cites a magnet effect of Western nations offering Eritreans asylum.
“What makes Eritrea different in this dynamic is the European and Australian and American governments who are encouraging the human trafficking by their own admission that they will give immediate refugee or asylum status to any Eritrean who reaches those shores,” Girma said.