GERRYMANDERING AND EXTRATERRITORIAL VOTING RIGHT IN ETHIOPIA

ACADEMIC MENTOR: PROFESSOR YONATAN FESSHA, Professor; Head Of Department: Public Law and Jurisprudence; Research Chair: Constitutional Design For Divided Societies 

STUDENT 1: TIBEBU HAILU JEMANEH. I am a Director at the Ethiopian Human Rights Commission, specializing in human rights monitoring and investigation in both conflict and out-of-conflict settings. I have prepared over 50 reports, public statements, press releases, policy papers, and advocacy materials, with a notable monitoring report on Tigray prepared with the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights. I also coordinated a local CSO’s observation mission during the 2021 national election in Ethiopia. 

Report.pdf to found here 

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: 

Submitting my thesis, entitled ‘Gerrymandering and Extraterritorial Voting Right in Ethiopia: Accommodation or Exclusion?’, for this year’s Student Minority Projects Challenge excites me, as I believe it provides a valuable contribution in devising institutional design for minority protection. The thesis has 35,297 words and was conducted under the supervision of Prof Yonatan Fessha to complete my LLM in Comparative Constitutional Law at the University of the Western Cape. The thesis investigates the electoral design of the Harari Regional State, the smallest subnational unit in the Ethiopian federation, which involves the gerrymandering of electoral districts, the reservation of legislative seats, and the extension of special voting rights. The thesis aims to assess whether these arrangements support meaningful protection for minorities or contribute to structural exclusion. It ambitiously combines doctrinal analysis, comparative perspectives, and contextual historical-political inquiry. The thesis elucidates both the concomitant benefits and exclusionary features of the electoral design. Although the design adopted to empower the minuscule Harari people, it contributes to the relegation of the numerical majority of the State into a political minority. While the design ostensibly adopted to redress historical cultural inequalities by empowering Hararis through preferential political rights, it has ended up replicating the very injustice it claims to remedy for non-Harari residents. Demonstrating such a dynamic impact of the design informs policymakers to reimagine alternative designs that accommodate both minority and the majority's interests. As the thesis suggests, expanded suffrage, as opposed to limited suffrage, regular diagnosis and drawing of Harari electoral maps, and abolishing arrangements that entrenched ethnic-based voting rights would elevate the political status of non-Harari residents, thereby ensuring their representation in the State council.