Being a home to more than 80 ethnic groups, Ethiopia has to balance normative diversity with efforts to implement state law across its territory. This volume explores the co-existence of state, customary, and religious legal forums from the perspective of legal practitioners and local justice seekers. It shows how the various stakeholders' use of negotiation, and their strategic application of law can lead to unwanted confusion, but also to sustainable conflict resolution, innovative new procedures and hybrid norms. The book thus generates important knowledge on the conditions necessary for stimulating a cooperative co-existence of different legal systems.

This is a book about legal pluralism, federalism, and human rights. It contends that legal pluralism is an important federalist policy in a deeply divided society, particularly Ethiopia. In so doing, it tells the story of the suppression of the diverse customary and religious laws in the country s recent past as part of the larger history of ethnic homogenization and state centralization. Since 1957, customary and religious laws had been alienated from the state legal system by virtue of the great influx of Western transplants providing the setting for competition between legal universalism and legal pluralism. In 1995, legal pluralism triumphs over legal universalism, as the 1995 FDRE Constitution recognizes the validity of customary and religious laws in personal and family matters. This book analyzes the salient elements of legal pluralism in Ethiopia, argues for redrawing the frontiers of formal legal pluralism in such a manner as to include criminal matters, and points out the challenges. The book throws light on this new development, and should be useful to academic lawyers and non-lawyers or anyone else who is interested in Ethiopian legal and political development.

This book is a collection of contributions by leading scholars on theoretical and contemporary problems of militant democracy. The term 'militant democracy' was first coined in 1937. In a militant democracy preventive measures are aimed, at least in practice, at restricting people who would openly contest and challenge democratic institutions and fundamental preconditions of democracy like secularism - even though such persons act within the existing limits of, and rely on the rights offered by, democracy. In the shadow of the current wars on terrorism, which can also involve rights restrictions, the overlapping though distinct problem of militant democracy seems to be lost, notwithstanding its importance for emerging and established democracies. This volume will be of particular significance outside the German-speaking world, since the bulk of the relevant literature on militant democracy is in the German language. The book is of interest to academics in the field of law, political studies and constitutionalism.

The papers by international and Ethiopian scholars included in Human Rights and Development: Legal Perspectives from and for Ethiopia focus on the interconnectedness between the protection of human rights and the achievement of development. The book adds to the international debate by providing a unique insight into the Ethiopian perspective on the nexus between rights and development and by discussing how this nexus manifests itself in the Ethiopian context. The comparative and international frameworks and examples constitute a valuable resource for the debate on human rights and development in Ethiopia, which is currently taking place in the context of the developmental state approach pursued by the Ethiopian government.

Enforcement has not been the most practiced business in the field of human rights in Ethiopia. The absence of effective enforcement can be attributed to various factors, including the absence of a normative framework, insufficient political commitment, inadequate institutional capacity and resources, and limited awareness. Despite recent legal reform initiatives purportedly driven by human rights demands, it remains uncertain whether enforcement has undergone any significant changes. Effective enforcement of human rights necessitates the existence of robust multi-layered institutions at the national, sub-regional, regional, and international levels. However, in Ethiopia, concerns have been raised about the capability of numerous normative instruments and mechanisms of human rights. This volume comprises a collection of papers presented at a hybrid conference held at the Hilton Hotel Addis in April 2022. The conference, organized by the School of Law of Addis Ababa University in collaboration with Friedrich Ebert-Stiftung, Ethiopia, centered around the theme "Enforcement of Human Rights in Ethiopia: Old and New Challenges." Its primary objective was to identify and analyze both old and new challenges in human rights enforcement in Ethiopia and propose strategies to overcome them. The editors of this volume intend for it to address scholarly gaps in the implementation and enforcement of human rights in Ethiopia. Among the notable findings from the chapters included in this volume is a significant disparity between recently reformed laws passed by the parliament and their execution by the executive body. This disconnect demonstrates a failure to prioritize and enforce human rights in the country. As such, the volume suggests that the Ethiopian government must take the business of human rights enforcement seriously.