U.S. State Department · Amnesty International · Human Rights Watch · Political Terror Scale 1976–2024
The 2024 Country Report on Human Rights Practices, read through 49 years of Political Terror Scale data — and a projection of what the 2026 report will document if the current trajectory holds unchecked.
49 years of independent, peer-reviewed measurement — three sources, one verdict. Ethiopia has never scored below 2. It has never reached 1.
| Era / Leader | Years | AI Avg | State Avg | Peak Scores | Notable |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Derg / Mengistu | 1976–1991 | 4.19 | 4.31 | 5 (AI, 1976–78, 1988) | Red Terror. Mass executions. The PTS was partly designed to document this era. |
| EPRDF (Meles et al.) | 1992–2017 | 3.88 | 3.58 | 5 (AI, 1998–99; HRW, 2017) | Relative improvement in cities. Severe repression in Ogaden, Oromia. |
| Abiy Ahmed | 2018–2024 | 4.67 | 4.43 | 5/5/5 (2022, 2023, 2024) | ★ 2019 Nobel Peace Prize LaureateNow presides over Ethiopia's worst PTS performance since the Derg. |
Sub-Saharan Africa · State Dept. Source · Amnesty International Source
Ethiopia scores at the same level as Sudan — currently experiencing an active civil war with documented genocide — and above Somalia, a stateless conflict zone. Ethiopia is a state with a functioning government choosing this outcome.
ENDF soldiers rounded up men, women, and children from homes, shops, and streets and executed them. In North Shewa, drone strikes killed teachers at a school holiday gathering — people who had nothing to do with any armed group. A soldier raped and shot an 18-year-old woman specifically to prevent her from reporting the assault.
The government announced "prosecutions of lower-level officers." No senior official has faced accountability. No verifiable case outcomes have been published.
With no structural accountability mechanism and Fano-Amhara and OLA-Oromia conflicts ongoing, the 2026 report is likely to document further normalization of summary executions. Drone strikes are expected to expand to previously unaffected zones. The pattern of targeting medical personnel, witnesses, and family members to suppress reporting is projected to intensify as documentation capacity shrinks.
International legal scholars may begin applying language of command responsibility at the level of senior ENDF and federal government officials — a threshold the 2024 report approached but did not cross.
The U.S. Secretary of State formally and publicly determined that ENDF, Eritrean Defense Forces, and Amhara regional forces committed war crimes and crimes against humanity — including mass killings, weaponized rape, and ethnic cleansing in western Tigray. Food, water, and medical access were deliberately blocked. Eritrean troops remained in Tigray and obstructed humanitarian corridors. In Tigray, 60% of households experienced moderate to severe hunger — worse than during the active war phase.
The 2026 report is projected to contain significantly stronger language than 2024. With Eritrean forces still present in Tigray, humanitarian blockades continuing, and no international accountability mechanism in force, the conditions for a formal genocide determination in western Tigray may fully meet the legal threshold documented by researchers. The Amhara conflict, which escalated sharply in late 2023, is projected to generate its own war crimes documentation layer by 2026.
International pressure for an ICC referral — which the government will categorically reject as "foreign interference in Ethiopian sovereignty" — is likely to become a formal diplomatic flashpoint.
Journalists detained in military camps without charge, beyond civilian legal reach. An investigative reporter was personally warned by a sitting state minister to stop reporting on the mining sector — now classified as "a national security issue." Three performing artists — including one who depicted a bullet wound on her own head in political commentary — were charged under terrorism statutes.
Censorship: Theater performances were banned. The Ethiopian Media Authority systematically narrowed permitted coverage of internal conflicts. Self-censorship became a rational survival strategy. Diaspora journalists face harassment in their host countries.
The domestic independent media space is projected to approach effective collapse by 2026. The diaspora press becomes the primary documentation outlet — and accordingly becomes the primary target of transnational repression. Internet shutdowns during conflict flashpoints are expected to be deployed more systematically and with longer durations. Use of terrorism statutes against journalists is projected to increase, with pre-trial detention extended beyond current norms.
Reporters Without Borders may formally rank Ethiopia among the five worst globally. The government will continue to frame every arrest as counterterrorism, not censorship — a distinction it controls entirely.
The 2023 state of emergency (expiring June 4, 2024) enabled mass arbitrary detention without public record. Family members were routinely unable to locate detained relatives held in military camps outside civilian judicial systems. Journalists, civil society leaders, and opposition figures held for months without charge — and without the charge being publicly recorded anywhere.
The PTS coding methodology specifically notes that "unlimited detention, with or without trial, for political views" is characteristic of a Level 3 country. Ethiopia is scored at Level 5 — meaning this has become background noise.
Enforced disappearances in Amhara and Oromia are projected to increase as independent documentation organizations are suspended, defunded, or driven out of the country. The gap between the actual number of disappearances and the documented number will widen — making the 2026 report simultaneously more and less alarming than reality warrants. A new state of emergency, or functionally equivalent security decree, is likely by 2026 — repeating the 2023–2024 pattern with geographic expansion.
Mass displacement from conflict zones — millions in Amhara, Oromia, and Tigray — created conditions that trafficking networks systematically exploit, particularly targeting women and children in IDP camps with limited security and oversight. Government capacity to address trafficking is severely degraded by conflict priorities and institutional collapse in affected regions.
With millions still displaced and humanitarian access restricted, trafficking is projected to worsen significantly. Cross-border trafficking to Gulf states through established networks may increase. The 2026 report may formally document state actor complicity within trafficking structures — a threshold the 2024 documentation approached but did not formally cross.
A Reuters investigation published February 13, 2024 exposed the Oromia Regional Government's Koree Nageenya security committee committing widespread torture, arbitrary detention, and extrajudicial killings targeting ethnic and religious minorities, political opponents, and perceived critics. ENDF forces tortured detainees in undisclosed military facilities beyond civilian legal oversight. No senior official has faced accountability for any documented case.
The PTS scale's Level 5 definition states that leaders "place no limits on the means or thoroughness with which they pursue personal or ideological goals." A Reuters investigation confirms this is not metaphor — it is operational policy.
With impunity fully entrenched and investigative access to military detention facilities curtailed or eliminated, torture is projected to be more widespread and less documented in 2026. A disturbing functional evolution is anticipated: torture used not only punitively but as a systematic mechanism for manufacturing confessions that then justify further mass arrests — creating a self-perpetuating cycle of legal cover for extrajudicial violence. Military detention facilities are expected to expand their geographic footprint beyond current documented sites.
Child labor is widespread in agricultural and conflict-affected zones, with children pulled from school to contribute to family economic survival. Child marriage persists and has intensified in displacement contexts — families use marriage both to reduce economic burden and as a strategy to protect daughters from militia sexual violence, placing children into situations that are themselves forms of abuse. Drone strikes on school and community gathering sites directly destroyed the physical infrastructure of child protection.
Child soldiers recruited by all armed factions — including government-aligned militias — are expected to appear more explicitly and systematically in international documentation. Child marriage rates in Amhara may spike sharply due to economic collapse and displacement insecurity. The collapse of formal schooling across conflict zones risks creating a generational protection vacuum that extends decades beyond 2026. Child labor in the mining sector — currently a reporting blackout zone classified as "national security" — is projected to remain structurally underdocumented.
Eritrean forces and Amhara militias deliberately obstructed humanitarian corridors. Aid workers were attacked. Children were reduced to eating cattle feed to survive. This is occurring under a Cessation of Hostilities Agreement that the government publicly presents as a peace success.
Internal displacement from Amhara and Oromia is projected to add hundreds of thousands more IDPs by 2026 — potentially matching or exceeding the 2020–2022 Tigray war peak total. The government is expected to begin systematically restricting international monitor access to IDP camps under security justifications, degrading documentation capacity precisely as the humanitarian situation worsens. Tigray is at risk of a second acute famine episode if Eritrean withdrawal and supply corridor restoration are not achieved — a risk the government shows no urgency to address.
Journalists and opposition figures who fled Ethiopia faced threats, harassment, and surveillance in their host countries. Guyo Wariyo and Tesfa-Alem Tekle reported ongoing threats after fleeing. French journalist Antoine Galindo was detained while interviewing an opposition figure — who was subsequently assassinated. Ethiopian diplomatic pressure was applied to host nations to act against diaspora dissidents.
As the diaspora community increasingly becomes the primary mechanism for documenting and amplifying evidence of abuses, transnational repression is projected to intensify significantly. Digital surveillance of diaspora activists, systematic pressure on family members still inside Ethiopia as leverage, and suspected intelligence operations across Kenya, Sudan, Germany, and the United States may generate formal U.S. State Department and EU designations and sanctions. The government will frame all targeted individuals as terrorist supporters — not political exiles — making the designation framework itself a counter-accountability tool.
The Political Terror Scale is not an advocacy instrument. It is a conservative, peer-reviewed academic measurement tool that explicitly instructs its coders to give countries the benefit of the doubt when evidence is ambiguous. When Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and the U.S. State Department — three organizations with different funding sources, different political relationships, and different methodologies — all independently assign the maximum possible score for three consecutive years, that convergence is not a political statement. It is a data point with nowhere higher to go on the scale.
Ethiopia under Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed has now matched and sustained the worst years of the Mengistu Derg dictatorship. The Abiy era average PTS score (4.67 by AI coding) exceeds the Derg era average (4.19). A Nobel Peace Prize laureate presides over a country that every major independent human rights measurement system scores at Level 5 — the level defined as terror with no limits, applied to an entire population.
The government's response, across every section of every report, follows a consistent structure: deny or minimize the specific documented incident; attribute blame to armed groups; invoke national security; promise investigation of "lower-level officers"; deliver no verifiable outcomes. This is not confusion or institutional failure. This is a vocabulary. It has been developed deliberately, applied consistently, and — because consequences remain theoretical — it continues to function.
The PTS has measured Ethiopia since 1976. In 49 years, it has never scored a 1. In 41 of 47 measurable years under the AI source, it has scored 4 or 5. Terror is not an emergency in Ethiopia. It is the infrastructure.