Abstract:
Ethiopia under the EPRDF 27 years of dictatorial regime has faced massive and systematic
human rights violations including extrajudicial executions, arbitrary detention, and torture, and
cruel inhuman or degrading treatments or punishments in different parts of the country in a
different time frame. The coming to power of Prime Ministry Dr. Abiy Ahmed on April 2, 2018,
signifies a start of a new area in Ethiopia’s political sphere by removing EPRDF to clear the
road for the establishment of the Prosperity party. To this end, countries emerging from a legacy
of massive human right violation commonly deal with their abusive past through transitional
justice initiatives. However, there is no-one-size fits transitional justice approach to every nation
around the globe. In Ethiopia, there were some efforts to come to terms with the past through
transitional justice initiatives. Despite efforts to deal with past human rights abuse through
different transitional justice initiatives Ethiopia including criminal prosecution and Ethiopian
reconciliation commission, has never addressed the need and priorities of victims of human
rights violations through a holistic and comprehensive reparative approach. Thus this thesis is
formulated with the objective of charting, evaluating, and addressing the need and priorities of
victims in the Ethiopian context by proposing context-specific transitional justice reparative
programs to victims of gross human rights violations. With this underpinning, the thesis
discloses transitional justice reparative measures through the analysis of the primary and
secondary sources. The study aims at providing a means to come to terms to the last 27 years of
EPRDF rule abuses through transitional justice reparative program. Therefore responding to
the atrocities committed under EPRDF through transitional justice reparative program that can
envisage a broader legal perspective; retrospective and prospective legal lens will ensure a
simultaneous response to the past injustice by providing a material and symbolic relief measure
to victims of gross human rights violation and in parallel, it will have the means to curb a future
reoccurrence of the abusive pattern especially by drawing institutional reform to institutions that
are source and cause of the abusive practice in Ethiopia.
