By Staff Reporter
August 18, 2020 (Ezega.com) -- Amnesty International has apologized to Ethiopia for posting erroneous media report about the country, as reported on its Twitter page.
“Our communication team recognizes the negative impact of our recent media output and apologizes for posting it in error,” it said.
Last June, Ethiopia dismissed Amnesty’s May 2020 report regarding human rights violations in Amhara and Oromia regional states as fundamentally flawed.
Amnesty International had accused the Ethiopian government of committing “grave violations between December 2018 and December 2019 in some parts of Amhara and Oromia regions".
The government had called on the organization to review its report which it dismissed as “lacking impartiality”.
Yet the Attorney General had stated that some of the alleged violations were found to be partially true and “most of the cases have been under investigation by the government in order to identify those accountable before the issuance of the amnesty report.”
A team consisting of members drawn from the Attorney Generals' bureaus of Amhara and Oromia regions, the police, universities, and civil society organizations (CSOs) has been investigating the veracity of alleged human rights violations.
It added that “Amnesty International has always supported the human rights of all Ethiopians. We remain conscious of Ethiopia’s complex and evolving political climate.” Amnesty International said.
The organization has since removed the video and apologized for the mistake.
Amnesty International has been under fire from Human rights advocates and Ethiopian activists after it posted a controversial video defending #OromoProtests which has led to a cleansing of ethnic and religious minorities in the Oromia region of Ethiopia.
Using the hashtag #DishonestAmnesty, rights activists worldwide criticized Amnesty International’s East African Bureau, which ignored the recent mass killing of over 200 Ethiopians, but focused on the mass arrests of detainees accused of involvement in the gruesome crimes.
Several international media have also documented an ethnic cleansing which at times also took on religious dimensions as the Orthodox Christian victims were minorities in some Muslim dominated towns of Oromia.
Associated Press (AP) wrote mobs were “going home to home checking identity cards and targeting Amhara residents.” While Globe & Mail said the killers chanted “this is Oromo land” during the massacres.
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