Violations of Human Rights

The Somaliland government’s human rights record compares favorably with those of the governments across the Horn of Africa region. Nonetheless, the government violates the rights of Somalilanders, most notably the right to due process through Regional Security Committees; the rights to freedom of expression, association, and assembly in acts of low-level repression of journalists, opposition politicians, and others; and the right to non-refoulement in the forced return of Ethiopian asylum seekers.

Somaliland lacks international recognition as a state and as such cannot be party to international human rights treaties and is not a member of the United Nations, which has adopted numerous human right standards. However, in governing the population in areas over which it has effective control, the Somaliland government is bound by customary international human rights law.[103] This includes respecting the right to life and the prohibitions on arbitrary detention, torture, and unfair trials, and ensuring the rights to freedom of expression, association, and assembly. Moreover, Somaliland’s constitution provides that the government shall act in conformity with international law and respect the Universal Declaration on Human Rights.[104] Somaliland’s constitution also contains many human rights guarantees that are found in international law, and provides that these guarantees be interpreted in a manner consistent with international human rights conventions.[105]

Regional Security Committees and Violations of Due Process

As described, Somaliland’s Regional Security Committees have no basis in Somaliland law or the constitution.[106] Nonetheless they are routinely used to incarcerate people, including juveniles, without any pretense of adhering to the due process guarantees enshrined in Somaliland’s constitution.

Each of Somaliland’s six regions has a Regional Security Committee (RSC).[107] As institutions, the RSCs are holdovers from the worst years of the Siad Barre era. Throughout most of the 1980s the Somali government used the RSC it set up in what is now Somaliland as a blunt instrument of repression across the territory. Under Siad Barre the RSC consisted of eight high-ranking government officials, most of them from the military and security agencies. The RSC ordered mass arrests; sentenced people without due process to punishments including imprisonment for life and the death penalty; and confiscated the property and wealth of alleged government opponents.[108]

Today Somaliland’s Regional Security Committees do not inflict the same kind of terror and abuse on the public, but they are still first and foremost a tool of the government to imprison people without a fair trial.

The Somaliland government appears to use the Regional Security Committees to imprison people where there is no evidence of wrongdoing or where a crime or violence may have occurred but the authorities have made no effort to gather evidence that would allow them to pursue a criminal conviction in trials before the regular courts. The committees are also used as crude instruments of juvenile justice, allowing the summary detention of troublesome youth often at the request of their parents. The committees are sometimes used to incarcerate the clan relatives of individuals accused of serious crimes in order to prevent revenge killings. And in some cases the committees have been used to detain people arrested during anti-government demonstrations.

In at least some parts of Somaliland, including Hargeisa, the RSCs are used as much as or even more frequently than the courts to incarcerate people. The secretary of the RSC in Hargeisa told Human Rights Watch that the committee incarcerated 249 people in 2008 and the first months of 2009.[109] When Human Rights Watch visited Mandhera prison in March 2009, prison officials affirmed that more than 300 of the prison’s 554 inmates had been sentenced by the Regional Security Committee in Hargeisa.[110] A 2004 report of the House of Representatives’ Social Affairs Committee found that over one-third of prisoners, excluding remand cases, had been sentenced by the Security Committees.[111]

Many of the cases that come before the RSC are ordinary criminal matters that would normally be dealt with in a court of law. For the most part these cases involve allegations of petty crime and public disorder—the Security Committees generally do not handle more serious cases such as murder.[112] The cases examined by Human Rights Watch primarily involved allegations of theft, clashes between rival youth gangs in Hargeisa, and vaguely defined allegations of causing public disorder.

Many of the government officials interviewed by Human Rights Watch were remarkably candid that the primary reason most of these cases are handled through the RSC rather than the courts is to impose prison sentences without having to produce evidence and sometimes without even bringing accusations of a specific crime.

The governor of Togdheer Region, who also serves as chairman of the region’s RSC, told  Human Rights Watch: “Sometimes when we cannot see evidence to convict someone—for example if there is a fight at a football pitch—we can just arrest all the people and bring them together in jail.”[113] In February 2009 roughly 150 people were sentenced en masseto six months in prison by the Togdheer RSC as part of an operation to address a spike in street crime in Burco, the regional capital. The governor explained to Human Rights Watch that, “we did not have such an evidence as to send them to court—but we have to maintain the security of the town.”[114]

Human Rights Watch also interviewed the governor of Hargeisa, who chairs the capital region’s RSC. He said that roughly 180 people were in prison as of March 2009 after being sentenced by the RSC for involvement in clashes between rival street gangs in Hargeisa. Asked how the RSC determined that those imprisoned were guilty of a crime since they had never stood trial, he replied, “There are no secrets. Whoever was involved will be known. The children themselves will say if some were not involved. Also we rely on the police because they know the communities.”[115]

The authorities also use the RSCs to impose penalties on individuals without individual criminal responsibility.[116] When a criminal suspect absconds, the RSC will sometimes issue an order for the police to arrest a relative in order to induce the suspect to surrender themselves to the police. This is partly a reflection of the woefully low capacity of the police to investigate crimes and trace missing suspects. As the governor of Togdheer region put it to Human Rights Watch, “We are not equipped with technology. If someone kills someone we cannot find him. So we will just arrest his cousin and he will be our GPS—that person will suddenly appear.”[117]

The RSCs are neither independent nor impartial bodies. Each Regional Security Committee consists of six members: the regional governor, who chairs the committee; the regional police commander; the regional commander of the custodial corps; the regional attorney general; the mayor of the regional capital; and the regional army commander.[118] The committees can issue arrest warrants and hand down sentences if a majority of their members agree on the decision. They can only consider cases when four of their members are physically present and all meetings must include the regional attorney general and regional police commander unless either is out of the country. Their decisions are not subject to appeal but can be overturned by the minister of the interior.[119]

The RSCs make no pretense of providing due process rights or applying international fair trial standards. Human Rights Watch interviewed several people who were given prison terms by the Regional Security Committee in Hargeisa, including some who are still behind bars at Mandhera prison. All of them were subjected to collective “hearings” alongside other detainees. The hearings generally lasted only several minutes and none of the accused were given a chance to speak. In many cases large groups of detainees were given identical sentences, even when the group consisted of people whose alleged crimes bore no relation to one another. In many cases the only evidence presented was a brief, sweeping statement by a police officer who claimed without elaboration that all of the detainees in the room were criminals.[120]

One 16-year-old boy who was sentenced to one year in Mandhera prison after allegedly being involved in a street fight described his hearing this way:

They took [around 20] of us to the first floor of the police station—no one of us knew the other. The only person I recognized was the mayor. They called our names and we all said “Present.” They didn’t say anything to us, and the only thing we said was that we were present. They did not make any effort to find out what happened. They then wrote a letter and sent us back to our cells. The next morning there was a truck waiting for us. A policeman was standing next to the truck, calling out names—he was reading our names and our sentences. He called my name and said, “One year.” I was not expecting it—I did not do anything, there was no court, no one asked me what happened—I was just taken by surprise when I heard that I had been sentenced to one year.

He was ultimately released four months into his sentence after his mother lobbied the Ministry of the Interior on his behalf.[121]

Other accounts of former RSC detainees followed the same pattern. Another young man, arrested with 11 other people while chewing qat one afternoon, said of his RSC hearing:

About 25 of us were there. I did not know most of them, but the policeman just referred to us as a group, and said we are all robbers and thieves. I did not have a chance to talk. When we entered they called our names— “present,” “present,” “present.” They asked the policeman, “Who are they? What did they do?” That’s all. It took less than 10 minutes.

The next day he was taken to Mandhera prison where he was told that he had been sentenced to two years in prison. “It was written in a paper that it was two years and that I am a thief,” he said. “But I have not seen the paper.” When Human Rights Watch interviewed him in prison he was two months into his sentence.[122]

The RSCs issue written decisions in cases that result in incarceration. The secretary of the RSC in Hargeisa permitted Human Rights Watch to review the archive of past RSC decisions in Hargeisa’s central police station, though he would not permit copies to be made. The RSC’s decisions are generally no more than two to three pages long and often a single decision serves to order and explain the imprisonment of dozens of accused individuals, even where their alleged crimes are unrelated to one another. One representative example of those decisions was a two-page decision of the committee from January 2009 sentencing 37 people to two-year prison terms and two others to three months in prison. The secretary affirmed that those sentenced were arrested at different times and in different parts of the city, on unrelated accusations of being involved in public disturbances, fighting, and petty crime. The only evidence in support of the decision was a statement by the police officer who spoke at the committee meeting where all 39 people were sentenced.[123]

Juvenile Cases

According to government officials and civil society activists a very large proportion of the cases that come before the RSCs involve families who ask the committees to incarcerate their children—mainly boys. The head officer at Mandhera prison told Human Rights Watch that most of the more than 300 Security Committee cases among the detainees there were “robberies and parents disappointed with their children.”[124]

These cases are often referred to as “discipline” cases and are usually brought by parents who allege that their children are disobedient, involved with gangs, drink alcohol, or indulge in other forms of disruptive or violent behavior.[125] Believing it to be an effective mechanism of instilling discipline, parents ask the RSCs to incarcerate their children. Many are not accused of anything that would amount to a criminal offense under Somaliland’s laws. Sentences handed down by the RSCs in such cases generally do not exceed six months and are flexible—if parents return to the committees and ask that their children be released early, the committees generally oblige them.[126]

The sentences handed down in these “discipline” cases lead to real suffering on the part of child detainees. Conditions in detention are harsh. Human Rights Watch interviewed teenage children who were imprisoned by the Hargeisa RSC at Mandhera prison. Compared to other prisons in Somaliland, conditions in Mandhera are spartan but relatively humane and juveniles are housed separately from the adult inmate population. But juvenile detainees are housed collectively in two large cells and “discipline” detainees who have not committed any crime are placed alongside juveniles convicted of violent criminal offenses who may be several years older than themselves.

One young man who spent eight months in Mandhera prison when he was 15 told Human Rights Watch that he was routinely harassed and beaten by older juvenile detainees:

In prison the harassment by older [juvenile] prisoners was unbearable—I could not handle it. One time a week my parents would come and bring soft drinks and biscuits. When they left and I went back to the cell they would just take all of it by force—clean covers for my mattress, clean clothes, anything my parents brought. Some of my cellmates had done rape, robbery, even murder—some had done these things many times, not just once. There were also some boys even younger than me in the cell. I was old enough to defend myself even if they beat me in the end. But some were 13 or 14 and they suffered more.[127]

As another former young juvenile detainee said, “Some people think being in prison is good for a child but it is not. It was a nightmare for me to be there.”[128]

The government’s use of the RSCs to incarcerate juveniles flouts Somaliland’s own juvenile justice law, a progressive piece of legislation that the government has largely ignored since it was signed into law.[129]

Vicarious Punishment as Conflict Prevention

Traditional Somali law, or Xeer, rests partly upon principles of collective clan responsibility for criminal and civil offenses, and collective action to defend and vindicate the rights of individual clan members. Xeer demands that the clan relatives of a person who commits a serious crime such as murder must compensate the victim and his clan for their losses if the perpetrator of the crime does not do so himself. If no negotiated settlement is found, the victim’s clan may attempt to exact revenge through violence. In some cases, such as where the perpetrator of the original crime cannot be found, that revenge will be taken against their clan relatives. Such incidents can spiral out of control into an escalating cycle of inter-clan conflict that becomes increasingly difficult to disentangle and halt. Preventing such conflicts from emerging is an endless and exhausting effort that is central to maintaining peace in Somaliland.[130]

Security Committee officials sometimes order the incarceration of clan relatives of a person accused of a serious crime. Such detentions are intended to cool the desire of the victim and his clan to exact revenge and thereby maintain peace until the perpetrator of the crime can be brought to justice or appropriate compensation paid. The governor of Hargeisa told Human Rights Watch that the RSC he chairs had dealt with 10 such cases between the end of 2008 and March 2009.[131]

Admittedly, this form of vicarious punishment reflects a complex and not easily-resolvable clash between important tenets of traditional Somali law and principles of individual human rights. But the Somaliland government has made no meaningful effort to strike an equitable balance the two; in fact it has failed to promulgate any relevant legal framework at all. Instead it carries these detentions out through Security Committees that are neither impartial nor independent and whose procedures trample the basic rights of people brought before them.

Under such circumstances it is not surprising that serious violations of human rights result. Human Rights Watch interviewed one detainee at Mandhera prison named Ahmed Hashi Jama who was put into prison because his nephew had murdered a man and fled the community. “They said, ‘You will be here for just a few days until they arrest the man who committed the crime,’” he said. But when he spoke to Human Rights Watch Ahmed was days shy of having spent four years behind bars. The killer had never been found, and the government had not managed to broker any kind of settlement between Ahmed’s clan and that of the victim.[132]

The governor of Hargeisa later told Human Rights Watch that he believed the killer had fled to Kenya and had died there.[133] Prison officials at Mandhera said that they had repeatedly written to various government ministries over the years, asking that a solution be found to Ahmed’s case, but had never received a reply.[134]

Harassment and Arbitrary Detention of Government Critics and Journalists

On several occasions in recent years the Riyale administration has attempted to impose long prison terms on individuals seen as political threats. While such acts of heavy-handed government repression are not a regular feature of Somaliland’s political landscape, government officials have on many occasions targeted journalists, government critics, and others for less severe forms of harassment and abuse.

Qaran

In August 2007 three prominent leaders of an opposition political movement called Qaran were sentenced to nearly four years of imprisonment because of their political activities.[135] Qaran represented a direct challenge to the political establishment in Somaliland. The Somaliland constitution provides that only three nationwide political parties can exist and contest national elections. In theory these parties are chosen based on their performance in local government elections, the first of which were open to all comers.[136] Qaran sought the right to compete in local elections in order to displace one of the established parties and ultimately compete in the next presidential polls.

Qaran’s leaders launched a public campaign in favor of their right to organize as a political association, during which they publicly criticized the government for refusing to recognize their right to do so. In response the government arrested Dr. Mohamed Gabose, Mohamed Hashi Elmi, and Jamal Aideed Ibrahim, the leader and deputies of the association. Their trial was conducted by a criminal court inside Mandhera prison. The defendants refused to participate or to retain counsel on the grounds that they had done nothing illegal and that the conditions of their trial were inherently unfair. Ultimately all three were convicted of “seditious assembly” for holding illegal political meetings, and sentenced to three years and nine months in prison. The court also imposed a five-year ban on political activity that bars all three men from standing for any public office.[137]

The Qaran case generated widespread public outrage and the government was soon forced by public pressure to relent somewhat. The three Qaran leaders were freed four months after beginning their sentences, in December 2007. The ban on political activity remains in place, however.[138]

Targeting Anti-Corruption Whistleblowers

Two of the most severe cases of government repression occurred in response to public exposés of alleged acts of corruption. In January 2007 three journalists with the independent Haatuf Media Network were arrested after the Network’s Haatuf newspaper published a series of articles detailing allegations of corruption implicating President Riyale and his wife. The articles alleged that on several occasions the first family had sold government vehicles for their own or relatives’ profit. Two members of Haatuf’s staff—Ali Abdi Dini and Mohamed Omar Sheikh Ibrahim—were charged with “offending the honor or prestige of the Head of State” and with “instigation to disobey the law.” The chairman of the media network that owns the newspaper, himself a journalist, was charged with resisting arrest. Their trial was moved from Hargeisa to Mandhera prison after its first two sessions and the defendants had no access to attorneys during the sessions held in prison. Yusuf was sentenced to two years’ imprisonment while his two colleagues received 29-month sentences.[139]

The Riyale administration came under heavy domestic and international pressure to release the three journalists. All three were pardoned by President Riyale in March 2007, roughly three months after their conviction.[140]

A second related case followed on the heels of the Haatuf arrests. Abshir Hassan Hashi, a former driver to Riyale’s wife and longtime confidant of the president, resigned his position and in January 2007 held a press conference where he alleged that he had witnessed gross acts of corruption by the president and his wife while in their service—essentially corroborating the general pattern of corruption alleged by the Haatuf exposé. In May 2008 Abshir was arrested and taken to Mandhera prison, accused of defaming the president.[141] He was held there for three months before falling ill and being taken to hospital in Hargeisa.[142]Throughout this period Abshir’s wife and children staged near-daily protests in Hargeisa, wearing t-shirts demanding his release. While Abshir was in the hospital the independent newspaper Geeska Africa published a front-page story about his case that included a photograph of Abshir chained to his hospital bed. This led to a public outcry about the case, including by elders of Abshir’s clan, and he was released less than a month after the Geeska Africa story was published. According to numerous sources, the terms of his release include an unofficial agreement that he will not speak on the issue of corruption again.[143]

Patterns of Low-level Repression

The heavy-handed acts of repression described above are an exception rather than the norm. But low-level harassment and brief arbitrary detention of government critics, opposition activists, and journalists is not uncommon and curtails basic freedoms. Often such abuses occur at the order of lower-level government officials rather than as part of any systematic scheme, but impunity is the norm. Where journalists and others are detained illegally on orders of government officials, many local activists believe that part of the problem is that rank-and-file police officers do not feel empowered to refuse to carry out those orders or simply do not know that they are improper. As one activist in Hargeisa put it, “The police don’t understand their role. Any minister can tell them to arrest you and they will do it.”[144] This problem is compounded by the government’s heavy use of the regional security committees, which lend a stamp of official legitimacy to the notion that government officials can detain anyone they like whether there is any legal basis for it or not.

Journalists have been the most frequent targets of intimidation and abuse by government officials. While the severity of the problem should not be exaggerated—arbitrary detention is usually only for very brief periods and generally the media are able to operate independently and without crippling interference. Nonetheless, low-level abuses are numerous and many journalists told Human Rights Watch that these incidents have a chilling effect on their work and on the press more generally.[145] As one opposition activist put it to Human Rights Watch, “On the one hand we have five dailies that come out with whatever they want. On the other hand we sometimes have journalists harassed or arrested.”[146]

Government officials at all levels, including the police, have on occasion ordered the arrest of journalists in response to critical reporting, or to preempt such reporting. Usually these detentions last a few hours or days. For example, during a Human Rights Watch visit to Somaliland in February and March 2009, the police detained two independent journalists near the port of Berbera who were investigating allegations of corruption related to food imports. They were quickly released but their cameras were confiscated and never returned.[147] Several journalists from Puntland have been detained in the disputed eastern region of Sool in connection with their reporting on the region.[148]

In several cases low-level government officials have threatened to use or used actual acts of violence or illegal detention in conjunction with bribery to try and influence media coverage of government actions or policies. In February 2009 a cameraman for the independent Horn Cable TV network was assigned to film a rally of the opposition Kulmiye party in Dacar Buduq[149] when he was approached by local members of the ruling UDUB party and ordered to come with them to film a ruling party rally instead. They offered to pay him to do this, but he refused, telling them that the decision was not his to make. A short while later he was forced into a car by two police officers, the local district commissioner, and a prominent supporter of UDUB in the locality and driven away from the Kulmiye rally. The men forced him out of the car in an isolated location outside of town and all four threatened, punched, and kicked the cameraman before driving him back to town and leaving him.

The cameraman recounted this ordeal in an interview on Horn Cable TV, and told Human Rights Watch that he received at least five threatening phone calls from blocked numbers over the course of the next several days. “I have nowhere to go and complain to because it is the government that did this to me and it is also the government I would go and complain to,” he told Human Rights Watch. “Now I don’t know what I will do. I either have to please the government or not work.”[150]

 Another journalist told Human Rights Watch that in February 2009 he was invited to meet with a government official who urged him to stop reporting on the president’s controversial attempts to secure a second extension of his term of office. “He said, ‘I want you and me to be together and for you to work with us and be friends and share information rather than working for the opposition,’” the journalist recalled. He explained to the official that he did not work for the opposition but as an independent journalist, and the meeting ended apparently on good terms. Less than an hour later he was arrested on the street by police officers who told him that the same official had ordered his arrest. He was freed the same evening and several days later he was approached by another government official who offered to “help and support” him if he would stop “attacking the government” in his reporting.[151]

Some government officials have also targeted opposition political figures with similar combinations of bribery and coercion. Ahmed Omar Haji Abdillahi, a Kulmiye politician in Hargeisa, told Human Rights Watch that he had been arrested in May 2008 after giving several media interviews denouncing President Riyale’s ultimately successful bid to secure an extension of his term in office. Ahmed said that after three nights in the Criminal Investigation Division detention facility in Hargeisa, he was visited by a prominent government official who pulled a US$100 bill from his shirt pocket and gave it to him, saying “I am going to give you many of these. Everything can be easily facilitated if you just cooperate with [the government].” “I told him ‘Thank you, but I already have many of these in my own pocket,’” he recalled. He was released the next day.[152]

Restrictions on Free Expression and Assembly

The Somaliland government has regularly violated Somalilanders’ rights to free expression and assembly. On at least several occasions the Regional Security Committees have sentenced people to prison terms for protesting government actions. For example, in March 2007, the Hargeisa Regional Security Committee sentenced 18 butchers from Hargeisa to six months in prison for protesting an increase in abattoir fees. The committee’s members include the mayor, the very official whose actions the accused were protesting against.[154]

The government, through the Ministry of the Interior, has also issued several blanket bans on any kind of political assembly while offering no legal justification for such moves. In July 2004 the Ministry of the Interior issued a Circular addressed to the regional and district security committees across Somaliland that banned all assemblies relating to political issues.[155] The decree was widely viewed as unlawful but was enforced nonetheless.[156] Similar bans have since been imposed with some frequency. In some instances government officials have used the ban on electoral campaigning in the two months ahead of elections as a pretext to bar all political meetings and public protests as acts of “campaigning.”[157] Some officials employed this rationale in interviews with Human Rights Watch. Most recently the government announced a blanket ban on public demonstrations following the Guurti’s controversial six-month extension of President Riyale’s mandate in March 2009. However the police did not attempt to disperse demonstrations organized by Kulmiye in several towns in April 2009 protesting the extension; the protests were discontinued when mediation efforts between Somaliland’s three political parties got underway.[158]

Forced Return of Asylum Seekers

The Riyale administration has forcibly returned Ethiopian asylum-seekers on several occasions. This does not reflect a general unwillingness on the part of the Somaliland government to accept persons fleeing onto its territory—Somaliland hosts some 35,000 people from south/central Somalia who fled due to conflict as well as large numbers of refugees from neighboring Ethiopia.[159] Rather, forcible returns of asylum seekers reflect the strong influence of the Ethiopian government over the Somaliland authorities. Ethiopia has long been Somaliland’s only regional ally, a relationship premised to a large degree on close cooperation on matters of security.[160] In at least several cases Ethiopia’s government has asked the Somaliland authorities to hand into its custody asylum-seekers who Ethiopian officials believe have ties to insurgent groups in Ethiopia, and the Somaliland authorities have generally complied with such requests.

These forced returns are in defiance of both Somaliland’s constitution and international law. Article 35(1) of the Somaliland constitution grants foreign citizens the right to seek political asylum in Somaliland, and Article 35(3) provides that foreign citizens can be extradited only if an extradition treaty exists between Somaliland and the country seeking extradition (no such treaty exists with Ethiopia, which like the rest of the world does not recognize Somaliland’s independence and therefore cannot enter into any treaty with it).[161] Furthermore, Somaliland’s government considers itself bound by the 1951 Refugee Convention, which prohibits refoulement (return) of asylum seekers to any place where their life or freedom would be threatened because of persecution.[162]

Most of the Ethiopian asylum-seekers who enter Somaliland are ethnic Oromo or Somalis of the Ogadeni clan. The regions they hail from in Ethiopia, Oromia and Somali Region, are both politically volatile areas. The Ethiopian military has been waging a brutal counterinsurgency campaign against the rebel Ogadeni National Liberation Front (ONLF) in Somali Region, which borders Somaliland to the south, for several years.[163] Oromia has long been a hotbed of political unrest, and the Ethiopian government regularly accuses political dissidents there of belonging to the outlawed Oromo Liberation Front (OLF), which claims to be carrying out an armed struggle against the authorities in Addis Ababa.[164] Most of the asylum-seekers who have been forcibly returned from Somaliland to Ethiopia are believed to be individuals the Ethiopian government suspects of having ties to armed opposition groups—which is often the reason why they fled Ethiopia.

Human Rights Watch does not have an estimate of the total number of asylum-seekers forcibly returned to Ethiopia but believes that numerous forced returns have taken place. Amnesty International documented the return of six Ethiopian asylum-seekers in 2007 and 2008.[165] Local activists and an UNHCR official alleged to Human Rights Watch that an Oromo asylum seeker was forcibly returned to Ethiopia in mid-February 2009.[166] A UN official told Human Rights Watch in February 2009 that “There are many deportations of refugees. Most of these deportations take place within 24 hours—so most of the cases where [UNHCR has] tried to intervene [they] have failed.”[167] Several local analysts and activists told Human Rights Watch that they believe the authorities in Somaliland feel they have no choice but to comply with requests from Ethiopia to forcibly return asylum seekers; ties between the two governments are close and strong, but it is difficult to overstate the power imbalance between Addis Ababa and Hargeisa.[168]

Based on it research on Ethiopia, Human Rights Watch believes that suspected ONLF and OLF members returned to Ethiopia face a high probability of arbitrary detention and torture. Ethiopians arrested inside the country and accused of ties to these groups are regularly subjected to such abuses. In many cases there is no evidence that victims have any ties to insurgent groups, but the allegations are used to justify the repression of peaceful political activity by people who are critical of government policies and actions.[169]