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The Right to Self-Determination under the Ethiopian Constitution: A Legal Tool for Indigenous Peoples’ Protection against Land Alienation?
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 September 2019
Abstract
Since 2008 the Ethiopian government has allocated vast tracts of land, particularly in the Gambella and Benishangul-Gumuz regions, to agricultural commercial actors with little or no participation from indigenous communities. The marginalization of indigenous peoples in this process primarily emerges from the government's very wide legislative discretionary power regarding decision-making in the exploitation of land. The government has invoked constitutional clauses relating to land ownership and its power to deploy land resources for the “common benefit” of the people, to assert the consistency of this discretionary power with the Ethiopian Constitution. This article posits that the legislative and practical measures taken by the government that marginalize these indigenous peoples in decisions affecting the utilization of land resources are incompatible with their constitutional right to self-determination. Further, it posits that the government's use of the constitution to justify its wide discretionary power in the decision-making process relating to land exploitation is based on a misreading of the constitution.
Keywords
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- Research Article
- Information
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- Copyright © SOAS, University of London 2019
Footnotes
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LLB (Bahir Dar University, Ethiopia), LLM (University of Pretoria, South Africa), PhD (Monash University, Australia). Former assistant professor, Bahir Dar University, Ethiopia. This article is extracted from the author's PhD thesis, supervised by Emmanuel Laryea (associate professor) and Justin Malbon (professor). The author is grateful to his supervisors and the anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments on an earlier draft of this article.
References
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