ICC Note: The Eritrean government has long been known as an enemy of Christ and now the United Nations (UN) says its abuses against religious and political minorities may be crimes against humanity. Eritrea’s record is appalling. The UN report details how the Eritrean state uses arbitrary imprisonment, extrajudicial execution, rape, and countless other atrocities to intimidate its people in order to crush all dissent. While Orthodox Christianity, Catholicism and the Lutheran Church are legal in their sanitized state-sanctioned forms in Eritrea, those who practice evangelical Christianity, participate in underground churches, or seek to follow the forms of their faith according to their conscience instead of the government, are all subject to these horrendous abuses.
6/8/15 Eritrea (The Guardian) – The Eritrean government’s systematic use of extrajudicial killing, torture, rape, indefinite national service and forced labour may amount to crimes against humanity, according to an excoriating UN report.
The 500-page investigation by the UN commission of inquiry on human rights in Eritrea catalogues a litany of human rights violations by the “totalitarian” regime of President Isaias Afwerki “on a scope and scale seldom witnessed elsewhere”.
It also accuses the government of using a programme of imprisonment, forced disappearance, surveillance and censorship to create a culture of permanent fear and crush all dissent.
The year-long study, which was carried out without the co-operation of the Eritrean government, is based on first-hand testimony gathered through 550 confidential interviews with witnesses in third countries and 160 written submissions.
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