{"id":8907,"date":"2014-08-01T11:29:28","date_gmt":"2014-08-01T15:29:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.zegabi.com\/articles\/?p=8907"},"modified":"2014-08-01T11:29:28","modified_gmt":"2014-08-01T15:29:28","slug":"uk-courts-orders-judicial-review-of-aid-given-to-ethiopia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.zegabi.com\/articles\/8907","title":{"rendered":"UK court\u2019s orders judicial review of aid given to Ethiopia"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"court\"<\/a>By William Davison \u00a0| Bloomberg News<\/p>\n

A British court\u2019s decision to allow a judicial review of aid given to Ethiopia is based on \u201cfabrications\u201d about a resettlement program propagated by people outside the country, the Horn of Africa nation\u2019s Foreign Ministry said.<\/p>\n

The High Court in London on July 14 said a review could be conducted into whether the U.K.\u2019s aid agency is adequately monitoring the human-rights record of Ethiopia\u2019s government. The ruling came after an Ethiopian citizen said his government had used aid to implement a resettlement program in the western Gambella region under which he suffered abuses. The program forcibly moved tens of thousands of people and involved \u201cserious human rights violations,\u201d according toHuman Rights Watch. The U.K.\u2019s development agency said it didn\u2019t fund the program.<\/p>\n

Ethiopia is enacting a five-year economic growth plan in a bid to reduce poverty and develop industries beyond agriculture, which accounts for 80 percent of employment, according to the United Nations.<\/p>\n

Ethiopia\u2019s Foreign Ministry said the Gambella resettlements were voluntary and successfully achieved their goal of improving public services in sparsely populated areas.<\/p>\n

\u201cOne reason for these distorted views clearly lies in the failure to understand the objectives of the resettlement program,\u201d it said in a statement e-mailed by Ethiopia\u2019s Embassy in the U.K. yesterday. \u201cThis has been further compounded by what can only be described as shoddy analysis of the programs on the basis of flimsy, politically motivated or even non-existent evidence.\u201d<\/p>\n

Basic Services<\/i><\/p>\n

The U.K.\u2019s Department for International Development, or DfID, is among donors funding the Promotion of Basic Services program, known as PBS, which provides grants to local governments in Ethiopia to fund the salaries of health, education, agriculture, water and road workers. The current, third phase of the plan that runs until 2018 has a budget of 510 million pounds ($864 million), according to a copy of the court\u2019s ruling e-mailed by DfID.<\/p>\n

The U.K. plans to offer 1.3 billion pounds in support to Ethiopia, Africa\u2019s second-most populous nation, between 2010 and 2015. DfID denied it funded the resettlement program and said assistance is only used to provide \u201cessential services like health care, schooling and clean water.\u201d<\/p>\n

The agency said July 15 it was unable to comment on ongoing legal proceedings. The PBS program has funded 38,000 health workers, 100,000 primary school teachers and 45,000 agricultural workers, according to Ethiopia\u2019s Foreign Ministry. Programs such as PBS helped Ethiopia\u2019s poverty rate fall to 29.6 percent in 2011 from 38.7 percent in 2005, it said.<\/p>\n

\u2018Important Step\u2019<\/i><\/p>\n

The plan to resettle people in Gambella in 2011 involved mistreatment and arbitrary detentions, New York-based Human Rights Watch said in a July 14 statement. The group called the court\u2019s decision an \u201cimportant step toward greater accountability\u201d after DfID made an \u201cinadequate and complacent\u201d response to abuse claims.<\/p>\n

It \u201cshould be a wake-up call for the government and other donors that they need rigorous monitoring to make sure their development programs are upholding their commitments to human rights,\u201d Leslie Lefkow, deputy Africa director at the organization, said in the statement.<\/p>\n

The World Bank\u2019s Inspection Panel, an independent complaints mechanism, is investigating similar claims that bank contributions to PBS were used for the Gambella resettlement plan.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By William Davison \u00a0| Bloomberg News A British court\u2019s decision to allow a judicial review of aid given to Ethiopia is based on \u201cfabrications\u201d about a resettlement program propagated by people outside the country, the Horn of Africa nation\u2019s Foreign…<\/span> Read more ›<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true},"categories":[4993],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.zegabi.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8907"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.zegabi.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.zegabi.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.zegabi.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.zegabi.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8907"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.zegabi.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8907\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.zegabi.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8907"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.zegabi.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8907"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.zegabi.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8907"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}