Ethiopia fires senior prison officials for abuse as wave of reforms

ADDIS ABABA (Reuters) – Ethiopia has fired five senior prison officials a few hours before the publication of a report by Human Rights Watch detailing torture and other abuses in a notorious prison and urging the government to hold managers accountable.

The sackings are the latest in a series of radical reforms led by 41-year-old Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, who took office in April.

The announcement by Attorney General Berhanu Tsegaye of the layoffs, including the director of the Federal Prison Administration, was broadcast Wednesday night on the Fana TV channel.

He stated that substitutes should respect rights in accordance with the constitution.

Abiy recently replaced the army chief of staff and the chief of national intelligence services, and layoffs occur a few weeks after Abiy spoke to parliament with a franchise unprecedented on the extent of abuses committed by security forces.

"Police badped, it's unconstitutional, police were terrorists," Abiy told parliament in mid-June.

Despite recent announcements, Abiy has not yet dismantled the culture of impunity in Ethiopia and guarantees accountability for abuses by security forces, said Felix Horne, senior researcher for the ### Africa to Human Rights Watch.

Prisoners from Ogaden Prison in the Somali region of the country have been systematically abused for years with limited access to medical care and sometimes to food, HRW said in its report.

The detainees stated that they had been stripped naked and beaten in front of the entire prison population and had been forced to commit humiliating acts in front of fellow detainees to spread fear.

Since taking office on April 2, Abiy has pushed for broad political and economic reforms in Ethiopia. However, badysts say that a major impediment to Abiy's plans is the resistance of extremists of the Tiger People's Liberation Front (TPLF), the political party that has dominated Ethiopian politics since 1991 when the Democratic Front Ethiopian People's Revolutionary (EPRDF) led Mengistu Haile. Mariam's regime of power after a civil war.

The TPLF is dominated by ethnic Tigrayans, while Abiy is an ethnic Oromo.

The ruling EPRDF coalition chose Abiy as the new prime minister after three years of protests that forced his predecessor to resign earlier this year.

Gebreyesus Gebregziabher, the former director of the Federal Prison Administration, is a member of the TPLF while his replacement is a member of the Abiy Party, the People 's Democratic Party. Oromo.