Mebrie, Solomon (PhD)Hailu, Shimelis2018-06-282023-11-042018-06-282023-11-042014-12http://etd.aau.edu.et/handle/123456789/4666The advent of counter-terrorism as a major international objective after 9/11 and subsequent proliferation of new anti-terrorism laws by states brought a new challenge to human rights, especially civil and political rights. The analyses of certain countries‟ Anti-Terrorism Laws especially in developing countries show two major impacts of Anti-Terrorism Law on human rights. The first impact is the post September 11 Anti-Terrorism Laws become broad and give discretionary power to police and security forces which in turn lead to arbitrary violation of the fundamental rights of suspects of terrorist acts. The second and most worrying aspect is some developing countries are using Anti-Terrorism Law as a cover to control political dissent, civil society, media and individual activists critical of government. The objective of this thesis is to identify and assess the impacts of the 2009 Ethiopian Anti-Terrorism Law has had on the promotion and protection of human rights. For the purpose of this research qualitative methodology is used. Both secondary and primary data were collected. As far as secondary sources were concerned; books, journal articles, newspapers, government enactments, legal instruments, organizational reports and official documents were used. To substantiate secondary sources with primary sources key informants interviews were done with 20 persons. For this purpose the research tried to answer the question whether or how the 2009 Ethiopian Anti-Terrorism Law put challenges to human rights. As the analysis of data shows, the 2009 Ethiopian Anti-Terrorism Law impairs the promotion and protection of human rights. The proclamation represents a broad and vaguely defined government power to investigate, detain and prosecute individuals at the expense of due process, judicial overseeing and public transparency. It empowers police with absolute power of arrest, search and seizure. It grants the police to make arrest without warrant, as long as the police reasonably suspects that a person is committing or has committed terrorist acts. Also the reduction of procedural requirements has led police to detain first and find evidence later. Moreover, the proclamation gives legal cover for the admissibility of evidence obtained through torture. Thus, its ambiguous and vague definitions can provide a government a tool of infringing basic human rights like liberty, privacy, prohibition of torture, prohibition of arbitrary detention, freedom of expression, association, demonstration and assembly. Furthermore, the 2009 Ethiopian Anti-Terrorism Law has had far reaching impacts on political pluralism and promotion and protection of human rights in the country. The proclamation provides the government with the tools to justify its intimidation of opposition political parties, CSOs, media and individual activists critical to government. As the analysis shows, the new Anti-Terrorism Law has been used to silence critics and punish political dissents, HRD and media‟s critical of government. The expanded law enforcement power‟s allowed incumbent government to apply the label to any groups or individuals. The vague and ambiguous definitions of terrorist acts in the proclamation led to the criminalization of act of political dissent such as public demonstrations, non-violent movements and minor acts of violence committed in the contexts of political activism. The provision which criminalizes „encouragement of terrorism‟ is also ambiguous and highly affects journalists and their sources including surveillance and it highly forced to provide selected information. This is evident that, in Ethiopia, most of detainees of suspected and convicted under the 2009 Ethiopian Anti-Terrorism Law were journalists, HRD, opposition political parties‟ members and leaders and CSOs critical of governmentenInternational RelationThesis