International legal context

Adherence to all treaties

Disarmament Treaties

Instrument	Status	Comment
1980 Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW)	Not Party
2001 Firearms Protocol	State Party
Optional Protocol to the CAT	Not Party

International Humanitarian Law Treaties

Instrument	Status	Comment
1949 Geneva Conventions	State Party
Additional Protocol I of 1977	State Party
Additional Protocol II of 1977	State Party

International Criminal Law Treaties

Instrument	Status	Comment
1998 Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court	Not Party

International Human Rights Treaties

Instrument	Status	Comment
1966 Covenant on Civil and Political Rights	State Party
Optional Protocol to the ICCPR	Not Party
1966 Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights	State Party
1981 African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights	State Party
1948 Genocide Convention	State Party
1984 Convention against Torture	State Party
1988 Protocol to the African Charter on the African Court	Not Party
Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC)	State Party
Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child on the involvement of children in armed conflict	State Party

Membership to International Organisations

Organisation	Status	Comment
United Nations	Member State
International Court of Justice	Did not accept compulsory jurisdiction
African Union	Member State
International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA)	Member State	Safeguards agreement in place

Domestic Legal Context

Imports, Exports, and Supplier Base

According to the SIPRI Arms Transfers Database, Ethiopia’s supplier base has passed through two sharply distinct eras separated by the 1974 revolution. Under the imperial government, the United States was the dominant supplier, delivering at least 539 major items across 33 orders between 1952 and 1976.

The Derg’s 1977 realignment with Moscow then drove a near-total re-equipment. SIPRI records the Soviet Union alone as having delivered approximately 4,970 major items across at least 37 orders between 1977 and 1988: 1,500 Strela-2 man-portable air-defence systems and 900 V-601 surface-to-air missiles (delivered 1978–82), plus 1,000 Malyutka anti-tank missiles; 200 T-55 and 70 T-62 tanks; 262 towed and self-propelled artillery pieces; 60 ZSU-23-4 and 10 ZSU-57 self-propelled anti-aircraft guns, and 25 S-125 Pechora surface-to-air missile systems; and 257 aircraft, including 50 MiG-21MF delivered in 1983 and 60 MiG-23BN ground-attack aircraft delivered in 1987. Smaller Eastern-bloc and other suppliers filled remaining gaps over the same period including East Germany (60 T-54 tanks, 1980) and Libya (100 T-55 tanks, 1983). That Soviet-legacy fleet still forms part of today’s inventory, though the past five years have seen rapid diversification driven by internal armed conflicts.

On the export side, SIPRI records only four Ethiopian transactions as supplier, all after the Derg period: ten US-origin F-5A/F-5E fighters delivered to Iran in 1985, three Project-205 missile boats delivered to South Yemen in 1987, and a single Project-205 missile boat ordered in 1996 and delivered to Eritrea in 1997.

The US Department of State’s Directorate of Defense Trade Controls (DDTC) added Ethiopia to the International Traffic in Arms Regulations’ (ITAR) Section 126.1 list in November 2021, following the outbreak of the Tigray conflict and citing ‘the ongoing crisis in northern Ethiopia as well as other threats to the sovereignty, national unity, and territorial integrity of Ethiopia,’ alongside the Ethiopian and Eritrean militaries’ denial of civilian humanitarian access; this barred licenses for exports or re-exports of US-origin defence articles and services destined for Ethiopia’s military, security, and intelligence entities. On 11 May 2026, DDTC issued a licensing-policy change functionally revoking that denial policy and moving to case-by-case review of Ethiopia-related license applications, with a formal rule removing Ethiopia from the Section 126.1 list reportedly expected to follow.

Ethiopia also has a domestic arms production capacity. According to Ethiopia Insight, its defence-industrial base is run by METEC (Metals and Engineering Corporation), established in 2010, grouping nine enterprises previously owned by the Ministry of Defence – including the Gafat Armament Engineering Complex and Dejen Aviation Industry – together with six further civilian enterprises transferred from Ethiopia’s Privatization Agency, for a total of fifteen, into a single state conglomerate managed by military officers but formally accountable to the Prime Minister’s Office.

A separate analysis, found that this developmental-state model of military-led industrialization was subsequently characterized by extreme project delays and financial-embezzlement concerns, prompting the Ethiopian party-state to reconsider the military’s role in the economy. According to a 38 North (Stimson Center) analysis, its arms-production core is the Gafat Armament Engineering Complex (small arms; 40mm grenade launchers since a 2002 reorganization) and the Homicho Ammunition Engineering Complex (‘Project 130’; small- to heavy-calibre ammunition, tank shells, mortar bombs, 120mm rockets).

The same 38 North report found both complexes received North Korean design and manufacturing assistance through at least 2007–08, and that a 2014 UN Panel of Experts report listed a North Korean entity as a Homicho supplier, raising a possible violation of UN Security Council Resolution 1874 (2009). No more recent reporting was identified; the UN Panel of Experts mechanism monitoring DPRK sanctions was not renewed after Russia vetoed its extension in March 2024, so no further Panel monitoring of this exists (see Risk of Diversion and Re-Export of Imported Weapons, below).

Separately, the government inaugurated SkyWin Aeronautics Industries in Addis Ababa on 8 March 2025 as an indigenous UAV manufacturer for domestic and export markets. Ethiopia has also reportedly domestically produced armoured vehicles under foreign licence: since a 2017 licence from Israel’s Gaia Automotive Industries, it has built 70 of a planned 75 GAIA Thunder Mk1 4×4 armoured vehicles (the remaining five completed in Israel), with platforms reportedly equipping Ethiopia’s ATMIS contingent in Somalia. Ethiopia’s separate ambition to reconstitute a navy is addressed below.

Domestic legislation relevant to the Arms Trade Treaty

National framework

Ethiopia is not a party to the ATT. It did ratify the regional Nairobi Protocol for the Prevention, Control and Reduction of Small Arms and Light Weapons in the Great Lakes Region, the Horn of Africa and Bordering States in 2004. Beyond this regional commitment, Ethiopia’s arms-control framework is primarily domestic and is divided sharply between its national defence forces and the security sector, on the one hand, and civilian firearms, on the other. There is no single, comprehensive national framework governing the conventional arms lifecycle.

Arms procurement by the ENDF is governed principally by the Defence Forces Proclamation No. 1286/2023. The Proclamation does not establish a firearm-licensing or registration system comparable to that applicable to civilians, nor does it contain detailed, publicly accessible provisions governing arms exports, end-user controls, or diversion risk. Its provisions on military procurement give the Ministry of National Defence broad and largely self-administered powers. Article 81(1) provides that the Ministry shall administer its property in accordance with federal procurement and property-administration laws, but Article 81(2) permits procurement outside those laws in specified circumstances involving national security and military secrets. Article 81(3) exempts defence-related goods and materials imported by the Ministry from customs duties and taxes, while Article 81(4) provides that the Ministry is not required to present customs declarations or submit military equipment and weapons for inspection.

The Proclamation also places significant restrictions on transparency. Under Article 82(3), books of account and documents relating to the procurement of military weapons and combat equipment are classified and may not be disclosed except through a procedure approved jointly by the Prime Minister, the Minister of National Defence, and the Chief of the General Staff. Consequently, while the Proclamation establishes a statutory basis for military procurement, the publicly accessible legal framework does not provide a detailed ATT-equivalent system of export licensing, end-user assessment, post-shipment verification, or diversion-risk assessment for military transfers.

The Firearm Administration and Control Proclamation No. 1177/2020 expressly excludes the Defence Forces and the National Intelligence and Security Service from its substantive scope under Article 3(2), except for the provision concerning the issuance of regulations and directives.

Civilian firearms are governed principally by the Firearm Administration and Control Proclamation No. 1177/2020. It repealed the previous firearms instrument, Legal Notice No. 229/1960, and Article 808 of the Criminal Code. The Proclamation is administered by a ‘Supervising Institution’, defined as the Federal Police Commission or a Regional Police Commission to which relevant powers have been delegated. It provides for a national, IT-based firearm-registration system and assigns the supervising institution responsibility for licensing, registration, marking, control of transfers, confiscation, and other aspects of civilian firearm administration. The Proclamation is itself supplemented by an implementing Directive No. 02/2022, per Ethiopia’s own 2024 national report under the UN Programme of Action on Small Arms and Light Weapons (PoA). The national SALW focal point responsible for PoA reporting has itself moved between institutions: Ethiopia’s 2020 PoA report named the Ministry of Peace as national point of contact, while its 2024 report instead designates the Federal Police Commission.

Within this civilian sphere, Article 4 prohibits, without a valid licence, the import, export, possession, storage, use, exhibition, brokering, sale, purchase, transfer, trafficking, transport, manufacture, training, repair and disposal of firearms and certain related equipment. Article 21(8) assigns the power to import, export, possess, traffic, transfer, buy locally, sell, train, repair, or dispose of firearms to the Supervising Institution, or to another appropriate government institution specifically authorized by it. The regime therefore does not establish an ordinary private commercial firearms-import/export licensing system.

The Proclamation establishes controls over the registration and traceability of civilian firearms. The Supervising Institution is responsible for registering firearms in an information-technology system, with registration generally organized by serial number. Licensed holders must keep firearms secure, comply with authorized ammunition limits, carry their licence, report loss, theft, or other loss of control, and surrender firearms when required. Transfers are generally prohibited: Article 20 requires firearms to be surrendered to the Supervising Institution, subject to limited provisions concerning inheritance.

Article 22 establishes criminal penalties for violations. Unlicensed import, export, possession, sale, transfer, or carrying of a firearm is punishable by simple imprisonment of one to three years and a fine of 5,000 to 10,000 birr. Where the offence involves a ‘bulk firearm’ – defined in the Proclamation as two or more firearms – the penalty increases to eight to twenty years’ imprisonment and a fine of 100,000 to 200,000 birr.

Transparency and Reporting

Ethiopia has not submitted to the UN Register of Conventional Arms (UNROCA). It has, by contrast, filed national reports under the UN Programme of Action on Small Arms and Light Weapons (PoA) – most recently in 2024, with an earlier report in 2020 – one of ten Regional Centre on Small Arms and Light Weapons (RECSA) Member States whose 2024 PoA reports fed into a 2026 UNIDIR/RECSA review of the Nairobi Protocol’s implementation.

Key Weaponry in the Armed Forces

Strategic position and defence posture

Ethiopia is a federal parliamentary republic. The prime minister is head of government and commander-in-chief of the armed forces. Ethiopia’s most recent legislative election, held on 1 June 2026, returned the incumbent Prosperity Party with an overwhelming majority. Opposition parties boycotted the election over concerns including digital voter registration, while voting was not conducted in parts of the country affected by insecurity, including areas of Amhara, Oromia, and Tigray.

Since the overthrow of the military Derg regime in 1991, the Ethiopian armed forces have remained under civilian political authority, notwithstanding periodic tensions between the federal government and elements of the security apparatus. Janes assesses the likelihood of a further military coup as low, citing in particular the November 2022 Pretoria Agreement that ended the federal government’s armed conflict with the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF).

Relations between the federal government and regional security structures nevertheless became a major civil-military issue in 2023. In April 2023, the federal government announced the dissolution of regional special forces and their integration into the federal army or police and regional police structures. The decision was strongly resisted in Amhara, where elements of the regional special forces subsequently joined or aligned with Fano forces, contributing to the escalation of armed confrontation between Fano and the federal government. The federal government’s decision was therefore an important catalyst in the subsequent expansion of the Fano insurgency, although the movement and the underlying Amhara–federal tensions predated the dissolution of the regional forces.

The same 2023 dissolution had a further, geographically distinct consequence: in Gambella, in Ethiopia’s south-west, longstanding Anywaa-Nuer inter-communal violence – aggravated by direct involvement of the South Sudanese Nuer White Army militia and Anywaa youth mobilization – has been linked by the Rift Valley Institute specifically to the security vacuum the dissolution left behind, which made the region ‘vulnerable to cross-border attacks and raids by armed militias from South Sudan.’ Separately, and unconnected to the 2023 dissolution, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights told the Human Rights Council in June 2026 that ‘reports of violence involving Orthodox Christians and Muslims in Oromia reflect a concerning escalation of inter-communal tensions.’ Neither dynamic involves the ENDF as a party, so neither is assessed under Compliance with IHL and Human Rights by the Armed Forces, below.

The Ethiopian National Defence Force has extensive battlefield experience derived from successive internal conflicts and regional deployments. Janes assesses the army and air force as possessing significant capabilities by regional standards and notes substantial acquisition of modern equipment in recent years (see below). Ethiopia has also sought to re-establish a naval capability, following the government’s announcement in 2020 of plans to create a navy and train naval personnel.

Ethiopia’s recorded military expenditure fell from US$1.23 billion in 2023 to US$700 million in 2024 and US$528 million in 2025, according to SIPRI. The decline in dollar terms should be interpreted in the context of the sharp depreciation of the birr following Ethiopia’s July 2024 exchange-rate reform. Military expenditure represented approximately 0.79% of GDP in 2023 according to the World Bank citing SIPRI.

Ethiopia has also maintained an important regional security and peacekeeping role, particularly in Somalia, and has historically been a major contributor to United Nations and African Union peace-support operations. Its armed forces therefore perform functions extending beyond territorial defence, including border security, counterinsurgency, and regional peace-support operations.

Geography is a major determinant of Ethiopia’s external security posture. The nation has been landlocked since Eritrea’s independence in 1993 and depends heavily on neighbouring states for access to international maritime trade, with Djibouti serving as its principal external trade corridor – a dependency through which more than ninety per cent of Ethiopia’s external trade transits and which has itself been ‘securitized’ into a core national-security concern. This dependence has increasingly been framed by Ethiopian policymakers as a strategic vulnerability and has contributed to Ethiopia’s efforts to secure alternative or additional access to the Red Sea.

Ethiopia’s pursuit of maritime access became particularly prominent following the January 2024 memorandum of understanding with Somaliland, under which Ethiopia was to obtain access to a stretch of Somaliland’s Red Sea/Gulf of Aden coastline – reportedly a 20-kilometre stretch near Luqhaye and Zeila in the Awdal region, leased for 50 years to build a naval base, alongside commercial use of the port of Berbera. This was granted in exchange for a stake in Ethiopian Airlines and Ethiopia’s prospective recognition of Somaliland’s independence. The agreement generated significant opposition from Somalia and heightened regional tensions. The subsequent Ankara Declaration of 12 December 2024, brokered by Türkiye, provided a framework for Ethiopia and Somalia to pursue commercial and bilateral arrangements concerning Ethiopia’s access to the sea, and the implementation and future form of Ethiopia’s maritime ambitions remain an evolving issue.

The Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) is another significant component of Ethiopia’s strategic environment. The dam was formally inaugurated on 9 September 2025 despite longstanding objections from Egypt and Sudan, whose leaders did not attend the ceremony after jointly denouncing the project as ‘unilateral’ and a ‘continuous threat to stability’. The dispute remains principally diplomatic, but it contributes to wider strategic competition involving Ethiopia and Egypt and Sudan and is therefore relevant to Ethiopia’s external defence posture.

Ethiopia’s security environment is also characterized by persistent internal armed conflict and insecurity along several borders. The federal government continues to face armed opposition from Fano factions in Amhara and the Oromo Liberation Army (OLA) in Oromia, while renewed violence in Tigray remains an important national security concern. These conflicts impose a substantial continuing burden on the ENDF and contribute to sustained demand for military equipment and ammunition. The nature and conduct of current ENDF operations, including the use of force and compliance with applicable international law, are assessed separately below.

Ethiopia also faces a significant organized crime and illicit arms environment. The 2025 Global Organized Crime Index assigns Ethiopia an arms-trafficking score of 8.5 out of 10, placing it among the highest-scoring countries in Africa. Its overall criminality score is 6.03, ranking Ethiopia 50th of 193 countries globally and 14th of 54 African countries. The assessment identifies ongoing conflicts in Amhara, Oromia, and Tigray as contributing to the availability of battlefield-grade weapons and identifies criminal networks, State-embedded actors and foreign actors among the relevant categories of criminal actors.

Composition of the Armed Forces

The ENDF comprises Ground Forces (the Army) and the Ethiopian Air Force; Ethiopia currently fields no operational navy (see below). The Army is organized around a central command and, since October 2020, six regional Military Commands – Eastern, Western, Southern, Northern, Central, and Northwestern. Open source places active personnel at approximately 500,000.

Army

The army is Ethiopia’s most combat-experienced service, with operational experience from the 1998–2000 border war with Eritrea, counterinsurgency and counterterrorism operations in Somalia, and the 2020–22 Tigray conflict. Military service is ostensibly voluntary for citizens aged 18 to 22, although the State retains a legal mechanism to mobilize personnel for mandatory service.

The officer corps has undergone deliberate ethnic rebalancing: some eighty per cent was reportedly ethnic Tigrayan before large numbers defected to the TPLF at the outset of the Tigray conflict in 2020, and reforms under the Hailemariam Desalegn and Abiy Ahmed administrations have since elevated ethnic Oromo officers, including senior appointments of Oromo Democratic Party affiliates in June 2018 and the September 2018 retirement of thirteen Tigrayan generals. Cohesion has also been strained by pay and disciplinary disputes – in 2018, more than 200 Agazi Commando soldiers sought an unscheduled meeting with Prime Minister Abiy over wages and operational tasking, which ended in a negotiated settlement followed by the imprisonment of 66 soldiers – and by ethnic-political friction at senior levels.

Air Force

Once one of Africa’s largest air services, the Ethiopian Air Force (ETAF) now operates in a substantially reduced form relative to its 1980s peak, with manpower reduced by more than half from close to 5,000 personnel in 1991. It nevertheless retains offensive and defensive counter-air, counter-land, and airlift capabilities, organized around two fighter squadrons and a combat helicopter squadron. Its main operating base is Harar Meda, near Debre Zeit on the outskirts of Addis Ababa. Dire Dawa is the principal combat-helicopter base and appears to double as the main basic-flying-training centre, while a small detachment operates the MiG-23 fleet from Bahir Dar. As with the Army, morale is difficult to assess directly, but reports of pilot defections to Eritrea and Kenya number at least a dozen since December 2014.

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs)

Per Janes, the ETAF holds 5 Bayraktar TB2 (of 6 delivered), 1 Bayraktar Akıncı (delivered 2024), 1 Wing Loong I, and an unspecified number of Mohajer-6 UAVs. Ethiopia acquired this fleet rapidly following the outbreak of the Tigray war in November 2020, which Janes assesses significantly improved the armed forces’ overall C4ISR capability.

Each TB2 can carry up to four MAM-L guided bombs; the Wing Loong I, operated by the ETAF’s Debre Zeit Fighter Squadron with a 20-hour endurance, can carry CS/BBE2 and LS-6-50 bombs and AKD-10/A, HJ-10 and TL-2 missiles; the Mohajer-6, likely operating from Harar Meda, has a 12-hour endurance and a 16,000ft operating ceiling. TB2-delivered MAM-L munitions from this fleet have been traced to a specific, well-documented war-crimes finding – the 7–8 January 2022 strike on an IDP camp at Dedebit, Tigray (see under Compliance with IHL and Human Rights by the Armed Forces, below).

Navy

Ethiopia has fielded no operational navy since Eritrea’s 1993 independence rendered it landlocked. The government announced plans to re-establish one in January 2020 and has since begun training naval recruits. A prospective headquarters at Bahir Dar and training access via Djibouti and France have also been reported, and this ambition is tied directly to the January 2024 Somaliland MoU discussed above. No operational fleet, vessels, or naval order of battle existed at time of writing.

Recent and current operations

Tigray conflict (2020 to 2022 and September 2026 to present)

The 2020–22 Tigray conflict fought by the ENDF alongside Eritrean forces and Amhara regional militias against Tigrayan forces killed an estimated 600,000 people before the November 2022 Pretoria Agreement imposed a ceasefire and a disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration process for Tigrayan forces. That settlement had unravelled in 2026 as per War WATCH’s 1 October update: the TPLF established a parallel administration in May 2026, escalating tensions that culminated in ground fighting between the ENDF and Tigrayan forces from 1 August 2026, with drone strikes across the region, including the first strike on Mekele since the 2022 Agreement. On 15 August 2026, Fano militias and the TPLF’s Tigray Defence Forces attacked federal positions on the Tigray-Amhara border in what War WATCH describes as their first joint operation against the ENDF, underscoring the growing tactical alignment between Ethiopia’s two active insurgencies. At time of writing, renewed hostilities were raging across the region.

Ahmara/Fano insurgency (2023-present)

Conflict has been burning in Amhara region since April 2023, when the federal government’s attempt to dissolve the Amhara Special Forces and other regional security forces – intended to centralize national security under Addis Ababa – was an important catalyst in the subsequent expansion of an armed uprising by Fano, a decentralized Amhara-nationalist militia movement whose tensions with the federal government predated the dissolution. A six-month state of emergency followed in August 2023. By January 2026, six previously independent Fano factions had unified into the Amhara Fano National Movement (AFNM), and in February 2026 Fano fighters seized territory in Amhara region, consistently claiming to have inflicted significant ENDF casualties. A UK Country Policy and Information Note records ‘at least 7,700 conflict deaths’ in Amhara region between April 2023 and April 2025, a figure it attributes to 7,720 political-violence fatalities recorded over the same period by ACLED.

As per War WATCH, Ethiopia v. Fano militia is formally classified as one of the three current non-international armed conflict (NIACs) in Ethiopia. It is governed by Common Article 3 of the 1949 Geneva Conventions and customary IHL only – not by Additional Protocol II of 1977 – because FANO, a decentralized network of militia factions without a unified command holding a defined territorial zone, does not meet the Protocol’s threshold for applicability.

Oromia insurgency (OLA, ongoing)

A separate insurgency by the Oromo Liberation Army (OLA) in Oromia continues despite a partial peace agreement reached with a breakaway faction in December 2024; the main OLA command structure rejected that agreement and continues armed operations, reportedly moving into informal alliance with the TPLF. As of War WATCH’s 1 September 2026 assessment, Ethiopia v. OLA is formally classified as a NIAC governed by Article 3 of the 1949 Geneva Conventions and customary IHL, and additionally by Additional Protocol II of 1977, since the OLA exercises the requisite territorial control in parts of Oromia.

Eritrea border tensions (2025-present)

Ethiopia’s relationship with Eritrea – its ally against Tigrayan forces in 2020–2022 – reversed sharply from 2025, driven substantially by Ethiopia’s pursuit of Red Sea access (see Strategic position and defence posture, above). On 1 September 2025, Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed publicly stated that Ethiopia’s loss of Red Sea access at Eritrean independence ‘was a mistake that needed to be corrected,’ and was reported as signalling a willingness to take the Eritrean port of Assab by force absent a negotiated settlement. By early 2026, the two nations were trading accusations and mobilizing troops along their shared border amid warnings of a fresh interstate war. Eritrea has since realigned behind Tigrayan and Fano forces, marking a reversal of its 2020–22 alignment with Addis Ababa: the International Crisis Group reports that Eritrean army commanders made a public appearance inside Tigray within days of ENDF–TPLF fighting in early August 2026, ‘underscoring ties between TPLF and Asmara’, corroborated by a separate report of senior Eritrean military figures crossing into the Tigrayan border town of Zalambesa on 3 August 2026.

Three days later, on 6 August 2026, the same report describes a formal coalition between the TPLF and the Eritrean government, known as ‘Tsimdo’, as having deployed tanks and heavy weaponry into the Tigray region, and states that fighting subsequently erupted in western Tigray, with the ENDF and TPLF disputing who initiated the clash. The further claim that Eritrea has begun supplying weapons to Fano forces via or alongside the TPLF rests on contested, non-independently-verified allegations: Ethiopia’s Foreign Ministry accused the TPLF and Eritrea jointly of financing, mobilizing, and directing Fano forces in the North Wollo area in October 2025, and Ethiopian federal police separately claimed in January 2026 to have seized more than 56,000 rounds of ammunition they said came from Eritrea; Eritrea has explicitly denied both sets of allegations, and no independent corroboration of either claim has been identified.

International Crisis Group’s 18 February 2026 characterizes Ethiopia-Eritrea tensions as a ‘powder keg’ presenting interconnected, mutually reinforcing risks alongside Tigray instability and Sudan’s civil war; its 17 July 2026 report went further, identifying Sudan’s civil war as ‘in many ways the prime driver of instability in the Horn’.

UN and African Union peacekeeping

Ethiopia has been one of the world’s most consistent contributors to multinational peace operations; an academic accounting by Ethiopia’s Institute for Peace and Security Studies (IPSS) at Addis Ababa University credits Ethiopia with roughly 168,724 personnel deployed across the history of these operations – Korea, Congo (1960–63), Rwanda (1993–95), Liberia (2003–10), Burundi (2004–06), Sudan/Darfur (2007–20), Sudan/Abyei (2011–21), South Sudan (2014–23), and Somalia (2014–23). Ethiopia also currently contributes a total of 923 personnel to the UN Mission in South Sudan (UNMISS).

In Somalia, Ethiopian troops were deployed between 2014 and 2024 under the African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM) and its successor, the African Union Transition Mission in Somalia (ATMIS), fighting alongside Burundi, Kenya, and Uganda, and alongside personnel from Djibouti and Sierra Leone, against Harakat al-Shabaab al-Mujahideen; the mission’s renaming from AMISOM to ATMIS enabled Ethiopia to access international funds to help cover military operations it was already conducting in Somalia, and some ENDF units continued to operate inside Somalia independently of the AU mission throughout this period. Per Janes, these peacekeeping deployments reflect Ethiopia’s strategic aims of promoting regional stability and strengthening relations with regional and international partners.

Compliance with IHL and Human Rights by the Armed Forces

Ethiopia’s armed forces have been repeatedly implicated in serious violations of international humanitarian and human rights law in the nation’s armed conflicts. Common Article 3 and customary IHL apply to the ongoing armed conflicts between the ENDF and the OLA, between the ENDF and Fano forces, and between Ethiopia and the TPLF. Ethiopia is also party to Additional Protocol II which applies to the ENDF v. OLA.

Tigray Conflict

The UN Human Rights Council’s International Commission of Human Rights Experts on Ethiopia (ICHREE), established in December 2021, documented in its 2023 findings that the ENDF, Eritrean Defence Forces, Amhara regional forces and Fano militias had all committed serious violations amounting to war crimes and crimes against humanity in connection with the Tigray war – including mass killings, systematic rape and sexual violence, starvation-related crimes, and destruction of schools and medical facilities – and that, more than ten months after the November 2022 Cessation of Hostilities Agreement (COHA), ‘the persistence of this situation…confirms…an ongoing pattern of serious violations.’

On the continued presence of Eritrean forces specifically, the Commission stated:

Since the COHA, the Commission has documented Eritrean forces’ continuing presence and involvement in violations in Tigray. It is particularly concerned about the ongoing presence of Eritrean forces in areas of Ethiopia populated by minority Irob and Kunama communities, both of which straddle the international border, and continues to receive credible reports of violations against civilians in these areas. The violations by the EDF, whether acting in coordination with the ENDF or on their own, highlight a flagrant failure of Ethiopia to protect its own civilian population from violations by other actors as required by international human rights law. The ongoing violations by Eritrean forces merit further investigation.

The report separately documents that rape and sexual violence by Eritrean and Amhara forces continued after the COHA, including credible information that more than 100 girls under 18 were raped or otherwise subjected to serious sexual violence after the peace deal, particularly in areas where Eritrean forces were present. The Commission estimated at least 10,000 survivors of sexual violence in Tigray alone, a figure it explicitly characterized as likely an undercount.

A joint report by Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) and the Organization for Justice and Accountability in the Horn of Africa (OJAH), published 31 July 2025, surveyed healthcare workers across Tigray, Amhara, and Afar on conflict-related sexual and reproductive violence. Its Tigray findings, drawn from the largest of the three regional samples, implicate the ENDF directly: of 391 Tigray-based healthcare workers who answered the relevant question, 73 per cent (287 respondents) indicated that survivors had identified members of the Ethiopian military as perpetrators of conflict-related sexual violence, alongside the 84 per cent who identified members of the Eritrean military.

Attacks on humanitarian workers have also gone unaddressed: an internal Médecins Sans Frontières review released on 15 July 2025 concluded that the June 2021 killing of three MSF staff in Tigray was ‘an intentional and targeted killing of three clearly identified aid workers’ – not, in MSF’s words, ‘the result of crossfire, nor…a tragic mistake’ – finding that a retreating ENDF convoy was on the same stretch of road at the time, and that one witness reported hearing an ENDF commander radio an order to ‘shoot’ the approaching vehicle and ‘remove them’. MSF says that despite more than 20 high-level meetings with Ethiopian officials and repeated government assurances that an investigation was underway, neither MSF nor the victims’ families has received any credible answer four years on.

A specific and well-documented incident illustrates the ENDF’s pattern of unlawful strikes on civilians: on 7–8 January 2022, the ETAF used an armed drone to strike an IDP camp at Dedebit, Tigray, killing at least 57 civilians and wounding more than 42 others, per Human Rights Watch investigations (and a list of 53 named dead compiled by the displaced community itself). ICHREE found ‘reasonable grounds to believe’ the strike was intentional and constituted a war crime, a finding independently corroborated by Human Rights Watch’s own investigation, which traced the munitions to Bayraktar TB2-delivered MAM-L ‘enhanced blast’ bombs and called the strike ‘an apparent war crime’ after finding no evidence of a military target in the area.

UN concern over Tigray persisted into 2026: UN High Commissioner for Human Rights told the Human Rights Council on 15 June 2026 that the ‘armed conflict in Amhara and Oromia continues unabated, as the warring parties kill, abduct, rape, arrest and detain civilians’, and that he remained separately ‘worried about the situation in Tigray’.

War WATCH’s September assessment documents a further set of incidents in the second half of 2026; unlike the 2020–22 conflict, these have not yet been examined by ICHREE or a comparable independent investigative mechanism. An ENDF drone strike allegedly hit Gejet General Secondary School in Seharti woreda, south-east Tigray, on 26 August 2026, destroying classrooms; War WATCH assesses that, unless the school was harbouring military personnel, weaponry, or equipment, that was an attack on a civilian object. The Tigray Education Bureau has separately accused the federal government of a broader pattern of school-targeting through a series of 2026 airstrikes, which it called, in its own words, ‘an execution strategy to achieve the mission of destroying the future of Tigray.’

Amhara/Fano insurgency

ICHREE’s mandate and report were confined to the 2020–22 Tigray conflict ‘and its immediate aftermath’. The Commission’s report mentions Fano only as one of several actors implicated in Tigray-related violations in 2020–21, and does not investigate the separate Fano insurgency (2023 to present) within Amhara region itself. War WATCH’s recent assessment likewise contains no Amhara-specific findings. Accordingly, this subsection instead draws on Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, which are the organizations that have directly investigated the Amhara/Fano war. A detailed Human Rights Watch investigation published in July 2024 found that the ENDF and government-affiliated militias had systematically attacked healthcare infrastructure and personnel across 13 Amhara towns since August 2023 – including a 30 November 2023 strike, believed to have been conducted by an Ethiopian Air Force drone, on a clearly marked ambulance near Wegel Tena that killed four people including the driver and a pharmacy director, despite the vehicle having passed through military checkpoints beforehand; the report also documents soldiers beating medical directors, threatening physicians at gunpoint, and conducting hospital raids to arrest wounded patients as suspected Fano sympathisers, while regional health officials reported 967 health facilities damaged and 124 ambulances seized by March 2024.

Separately, Amnesty International documented ENDF soldiers conducting house-to-house searches in Merawi on 29 January 2024 after fighting subsided, rounding up local men and summarily shooting them; witness and video evidence supported more than 50 killed, with one verified video alone showing at least 22 bodies along the town’s main road. Two further strikes, drawn from contemporaneous reporting, illustrate the same pattern: on 5 November 2024, multiple ENDF airstrikes hit a marketplace, an elementary school, and a health centre in Zibist (Arge) town, Debub Achefer woreda, West Gojam zone, killing at least 43 people – including thirteen children and several pregnant women – in what was, at the time, the deadliest single airstrike since the Amhara conflict began; and on 17 April 2025, an ENDF drone strike hit Gedeb town, Enarj Enawga woreda, East Gojjam zone, with local reports of more than 100 (some putting the figure at 115–120) dead – residents said those killed were building a school fence, while the woreda administration dismissed this as “enemy propaganda” and Fano’s own deputy chairman maintained all the dead were civilians and no armed fighters were present. Human Rights Watch’s World Report 2026 separately records a further ENDF drone strike in North Shewa in early February 2025 that killed a pregnant woman, her six-year-old daughter, and a young man, and a 20 February 2025 strike in East Gojjam that killed 16 people, including children, and wounded 10 more.

Amnesty International separately documented, in November 2024, the arbitrary month-long mass detention of thousands of civilians across at least four camps in Amhara region – including at least 1,610 people held at Dangla camp alone, alongside judges, prosecutors, and university academic staff swept up in the same operation – rather than a detention confined to combatants or clearly identified Fano fighters. On conflict-related sexual violence specifically, the Forum for Higher Education Institutions in the Amhara Region – a coalition of Ethiopian universities and civil society bodies – reported in October 2024 that more than 5,000 survivors of sexual and gender-based violence had sought clinical care in the region over the preceding year, a figure it said likely understated the true toll given stigma and limited healthcare access in conflict areas.

For context, Fano forces have themselves been documented committing extortion, kidnapping, sexual violence, attacks on school staff, and grenade attacks on anti-war rallies, along with targeting of displaced Sudanese refugees.

Oromia insurgency

Evidence of ENDF violations specifically is less systematically documented in Oromia than in Tigray and Amhara. Human Rights Watch’s World Report 2026 records that ‘fighting between the federal government and the Oromo Liberation Army, in addition to clashes among armed groups, continued in parts of Oromia and resulted in civilian casualties and displacement,’ and separately that, ‘between late 2024 and early 2025, local communities and regional militias clashed in the Dacawaley area of Ethiopia’s Somali region, a site of long-standing grievances over land, killing and injuring dozens’.

Recruitment, conscription and the protection of children

Human Rights Watch documented a Tigrayan-authorities forced-recruitment campaign that ‘intensified in late April [2026] with mass roundups in streets, markets, and gold-mining sites,’ including the recruitment of children as young as fifteen. In early June 2026, the TPLF issued a proclamation – reviewed by Human Rights Watch – establishing a framework of compulsory military mobilization for those whose ‘health and age permit’, backed by penalties including the death penalty and up to 25 years’ imprisonment for those who criticize or advocate resistance to the recruitment campaign, while a TPLF spokesperson denied the forced-recruitment allegations, saying those defending Tigray were doing so voluntarily. Reportedly, the ENDF itself has also been credibly documented engaging in forced recruitment: the Ethiopian Human Rights Commission reported in December 2024 that the military has forcibly recruited teenage boys, a practice it linked to sustaining operations against non-State armed groups in Amhara and Oromia.

The Committee on the Rights of the Child considered Ethiopia’s combined sixth and seventh periodic reports on 26 January 2026 and, in concluding observations adopted 30 January 2026, remained ‘deeply concerned about the significant increase in grave violations of children’s rights, including the killing and maiming of children, sexual violence against children and the abduction of children, as well as incidents of the denial of humanitarian access’. It urged Ethiopia to adopt a national strategy to prevent the involvement of children in armed conflict, to ‘urgently facilitate access to encampments to enable children to be identified and transferred to civilian actors in the field of child protection,’ and to ‘hold perpetrators accountable and provide assistance, medical care, including reproductive healthcare, psychosocial support and legal aid to conflict-affected children’ – though without naming individual armed actors or specifically attributing recruitment to the ENDF. The Committee separately noted that Ethiopia’s initial report on implementing OPAC itself has been ‘overdue since 14 May 2014’.

The Ethiopia Human Rights Commission’s March 2024 (available via OHCHR) complementary report to the Committee found that: ‘Numerous monitoring and investigations by EHRC into violations of human rights in the context of armed conflict have shown that children are subjected to a wide range of violations including SGBV, physical injuries and, in some cases, killings as a direct result of violence. Additionally, children have been exposed to traumatic experiences such as witnessing the killing or rape of close family members by the parties to the conflict. The conflict in the Northern Ethiopia which affected Tigray, Amhara, and Afar regional states, as well as conflict in Oromia and Benishangul Gumuz regional states have caused widespread destruction and looting of public and private facilities affecting children’s right to health, education, as well as access to food and water. Moreover, recurring clashes and violence in Gambella and Southern regional states (Konso zone) have impacted children’s rights and caused the displacement of children.’

Compliance by Ethiopian Peacekeeping Forces

The UN’s own Conduct in UN Field Missions dataset records four sexual exploitation and abuse (SEA) allegations against Ethiopian peacekeeping personnel between 2016 and 2020, across three missions: two in UNMISS (South Sudan) and one each in UNMIL (Liberia) and UNISFA (Abyei). Three were closed as unsubstantiated; the UNMIL case – an ‘exploitative relationship’ with an adult victim, involving a paternity claim – was substantiated and resulted in repatriation. None of the four resulted in a referral for criminal accountability.

Accountability Mechanisms

Accountability mechanisms remain weak. The Transitional Justice Policy of Ethiopia (TJPE), adopted by the Federal Ministers’ Cabinet in April 2024 pursuant to Article 10(3) of the Pretoria Agreement, has – per War WATCH – been adopted but ‘not effectively implemented’; no domestic prosecutions for war crimes or crimes against humanity from either the 2020–22 Tigray or current conflicts are known to have been brought; and Ethiopia is not a party to the Rome Statute. International oversight has also receded rather than strengthened: Amnesty International noted in August 2026 that ‘regional and international human rights monitoring in Ethiopia collapsed’ following the termination of the mandates of ICHREE itself and of the African Commission’s own Commission of Inquiry on Tigray, and that Ethiopia ‘must never normalize the absence of credible investigations and prosecution of perpetrators’.

That African Commission inquiry is itself a case study in the same accountability gap: established in May 2021 to investigate alleged extrajudicial executions and sexual violence in Tigray and determine whether they amounted to serious and massive human rights violations, it held oral hearings and received witness testimony but was never granted access to the Tigray region, and had produced no public report on its findings by the time the African Commission terminated its mandate on 23 May 2023 – citing the November 2022 Pretoria Agreement and Ethiopia’s (subsequently unimplemented) transitional justice policy among its reasons. Human Rights Watch called a termination without any report ‘an abdication of the Commission’s duty towards victims and witnesses,’ alleging it followed nearly two years of Ethiopian government pressure for the inquiry’s closure.

Key Weaponry in Law Enforcement Agencies

Legal Framework

Federal policing is organized under the Federal Police Commission, established by the Ethiopian Federal Police Commission Establishment Proclamation No. 720/2011. The Proclamation establishes the Commission as an autonomous federal organ with its own legal personality and assigns it responsibility for maintaining peace and security while respecting and ensuring compliance with the Constitution and other laws (Art. 3(1) and Art. 5). Article 24 of the Proclamation also prohibits Federal Police personnel from committing inhuman or degrading treatment. The Federal Police Officers Administration Council of Ministers Regulation No. 268/2012 provides the principal publicly accessible federal police rules on officers’ administration, ethics, and use of force.

The constitutional basis for regional policing is different. Article 52(2)(g) of the FDRE Constitution gives regional states the power to ‘establish and administer a state police force, and to maintain public order and peace within the State.’ Regional police forces are consequently established and regulated through regional legislation. In Amhara, the Police Commission was re-established under Proclamation No. 216/2014, while the revised Amhara Regional Police Officers’ Administration Council of Regional Government Regulation No. 175/2018 provides the more recent administrative framework identified in a peer-reviewed source. In Oromia, the Oromia Police Commission states that its powers and duties derive from Proclamation No. 163/2003 on the reorganization and powers of the regional executive organs; its published description of those functions includes crime prevention and ensuring that criminal investigations respect the constitutional and legal rights of suspects and detained persons.

Regulation No. 175/2018 repealed the earlier Amhara Regional Police Officers’ Administration Regulation No. 6/2003. On use of force specifically, Article 47(1) states: ‘Any regional police officer may use force to apprehend a person who commits a crime and to protect himself or others from harm in the absence of other options where he has encountered a manifest resistance while carrying out his duties.’ Article 47(2) specifies: ‘Without prejudice to the provision of Sub-Art. (1) of this Article hereof, the measure of force which the police officer would use shall be taken on the basis of proportionality, necessity and legitimate authority.’

Separately, Proclamation No. 720/2011 also sets out how federal and regional police relate to one another. A Joint Council, chaired by the Commissioner General, brings the Federal Police Commission and regional police commissions together to align recruitment, training, and administration standards and to cooperate on crime prevention and investigation (Art. 18). Addis Ababa and Dire Dawa’s city police commissions are treated as a special case: they are accountable to the Federal Police Commission by default, though arrangements can instead make them report to their own city administrations (Art. 20).

The general federal criminal-law framework also contains provisions relevant to the legality and proportionality of force. Article 69 of the 2004 Criminal Code provides a defence for an act performed in the exercise of a professional duty where it accords with accepted professional practice and involves no grave professional fault, while Article 78 provides that legitimate defence is lawful only where an unlawful or imminent unlawful attack could not otherwise have been averted and the defence was proportionate to the circumstances. Article 79 addresses excessive force in legitimate defence, providing that a court shall reduce the penalty without restriction where the limits of legitimate defence were exceeded through disproportionate means, and may impose no punishment at all where the excess was due to excusable fear, surprise, or excitement caused by the attack. These provisions provide general criminal-law standards but do not constitute a comprehensive police use-of-force regime.

For arrest specifically, Article 56(4) of the 1961 Criminal Procedure Code provided that where a person forcibly resists arrest or attempts to evade arrest, the arresting officer may use means proportionate to the circumstances to effect the arrest. The African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights’ Study on the Use of Force by Law Enforcement Officials in Africa (2023) independently confirms this same proportionality standard. The 1961 Code has since been replaced: the House of Peoples’ Representatives adopted a new Criminal Procedure and Evidence Code as Proclamation No. 1410/2026 on 3 April 2026, replacing legislation that had been in force for over sixty years. Article 56(4) has a direct successor: Article 114(5) provides that where a suspect has forcibly resisted apprehension or attempted to escape, the investigating officer may apprehend the suspect using proportionate force appropriate to the circumstances. The Code separately contains a broader use-of-force provision with no direct predecessor in the 1961 Code: Article 76 ‘use of proportionate force during investigation’ permits an investigating officer to use proportionate force to apprehend a suspect to conduct a search, or to carry out a special investigative method, but only where strictly necessary and where it is confirmed that no other alternative exists, and subject to the principles of caution, legality and non-discrimination.

For Federal Police officers, Regulation No. 268/2012 provides the most specific rules. Article 44 requires officers to respect and protect the Constitution, human rights treaties ratified by Ethiopia and other laws. Article 45 provides that an officer may use proportionate force where faced with clear resistance in the discharge of duties and where other options are unavailable. Firearms may be used only where measures short of firearms are insufficient to protect the officer or another person from death or grave bodily injury, or to apprehend a dangerous criminal suspect or restrain a suspect or convicted prisoner from escaping. An officer who uses a firearm must assist an injured person in obtaining emergency medical treatment and immediately report the incident to the competent superior.

The central firearms-control legislation is the Firearm Administration and Control Proclamation No. 1177/2020 (discussed under Domestic legislation relevant to the implementation of the Arms Trade Treaty, above). The Proclamation identifies the Federal Police Commission or a Regional Police Commission to which powers are delegated as the ‘Supervising Institution’ and was enacted pursuant to the federal constitutional power under Article 51(21) concerning possession and bearing of arms. Most importantly for police armament, The Proclamation establishes a legal mechanism for determining police weaponry but does not itself contain the detailed list of weapons and quantities authorized to federal and regional law enforcement bodies. It also treats the Defence Force and National Intelligence and Security Service differently: Article 25 permits those bodies to decide on their firearm types, quantities, and conditions of use.

The domestic framework assessed against Ethiopia’s international human-rights obligations shows gaps. In its second periodic report to the Human Rights Committee, Ethiopia itself acknowledged that the existing legal framework governing the use of force and firearms was inadequate and did not meet human rights standards, and stated that a new use-of-force law and police accountability system were being drafted by the Office of the Federal Attorney General. In its 2022 concluding observations, the Human Rights Committee similarly found that the legal framework governing use of force and firearms by State agents remained inadequate and inconsistent with the Covenant and the UN Basic Principles on the Use of Force and Firearms, and recommended that Ethiopia expedite adoption of a compliant law – the Committee noted this was not a new finding but a concern it had first raised in its 2011 concluding observations on Ethiopia’s initial report, more than a decade earlier.

The status of the draft legislation remains unclear. In its 2021 replies to the Human Rights Committee’s list of issues, Ethiopia acknowledged that the existing legislative framework governing the use of force by law-enforcement agencies was not comprehensive and stated that consultations with stakeholders had delayed completion of a new use-of-force law. In 2022, The Reporter reported that the draft use-of-force proclamation remained under consideration but had stalled amid opposition from representatives of the police. No subsequent Human Rights Committee follow-up on this issue was provided in Ethiopia’s November 2025 follow-up report. This profile has not identified evidence that the proposed comprehensive use-of-force law has yet been enacted.

A separate legal issue concerns the former Regional Special Police Forces. The FDRE Constitution expressly authorises regional states to establish and administer a state police force, but does not expressly mention such a separate category of ‘special police’ or ‘special forces’. The European Institute of Peace’s detailed study of the regional special police concluded that their constitutional mandate, legal status, and accountability framework remained contested and that no specific legal provision dealt with the special police as a distinct institution. It also found that these forces had become increasingly militarized and, in some cases, difficult to distinguish from an army in terms of training, weaponry, and functions. This distinction also matters for weapons regulation. The legal authority for regional states to maintain ordinary police does not necessarily resolve the legal status of a separate paramilitary force equipped and trained to military standards. The regional special police emerged first in the Somali Region (the so-called Liyu Police – liyu means ‘special’ in Amharic) and subsequently spread to other regions, including Oromia and Amhara, and their roles expanded from counterinsurgency and riot control to involvement in conflicts and other military-type operations.

The federal government and then-regional president Abdi Mohamed Omar (‘Abdi Iley’) established the force to counter the insurgency, deliberately recruiting from the same Ogaden clans the ONLF itself drew on, including ONLF defectors, and it grew from an initial estimated strength of around 10,000 to later estimates as high as 45,000. Oromia established its own special police force in 2008, partly in response to border disputes with the Somali region. International assistance to the force’s early buildup was, and remains, contested. Sources describe the Somali force’s creation as an administrative act by the regional president in his capacity as head of the Regional Bureau of Justice and Security, not as the product of any federal or regional proclamation, regulation, or other legislative instrument.

In April 2023, the federal government announced that regional special forces would be dismantled and their members integrated into the ENDF, Federal Police, or respective Regional Police, or otherwise reintegrated into civilian life. On 15 April 2023, the Chief of Staff of the ENDF stated that there was no longer an organization or structure called a regional special force and that the security structure would consist of the national defence forces, Federal Police, and regional police. The US Department of State subsequently recorded that the government had disbanded regional special forces nationwide in April 2023.

The decision to dismantle the regional special forces in April 2023 raised questions about assessing the constitutional basis for both their establishment and their dissolution – questions a legal commentary attempted to answer, arguing that the decision was in substance made by the ruling Prosperity Party rather than through federal or regional state organs, and that no specific federal proclamation or other Negarit Gazeta legislative instrument formalizing the dissolution could be identified, leaving its constitutional basis unresolved.

The implementation nevertheless had direct consequences for weapons control. ACLED records that the announcement led to clashes in Amhara between ENDF forces and Amhara Special Forces and allied Fano forces amid attempts to disarm or integrate the regional forces – specifically, armed clashes in North Wello zone beginning 6 April 2023, triggered when the ENDF attempted to ‘disarm’ regional special-force members, with the government’s national integration announcement following that initial clash rather than preceding it. Regional authorities in Somali, Oromia, and SNNPR also announced plans to implement the integration. What became of the weapons these forces held, and the resulting weapons-control gap, are addressed together with the forces’ unresolved legal status under Weapons and equipment and related diversion questions, below. 

Oversight

Oversight of Ethiopia’s use-of-force standards remains predominantly internal to the police commissions themselves via Ethics and Discipline Committees – a mechanism the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights itself noted, in its 2015 concluding observations on Ethiopia’s fifth and sixth periodic report, as Ethiopia’s reported ‘establishment of the Ethics/Discipline Committees in all Police Commissions to investigate cases of violations of human rights and take necessary administrative measures against perpetrators’. The Federal Police Officers Administration Council of Ministers Regulation No. 268/2012 provides that ‘any police officer shall be liable for the damages caused as a result of his decision or action in violation of the law’ (Art. 51), and separately lists both ‘committing an act of human right contravention or performing an act or rendering a decision contrary to the Constitution’ (Art. 54(20)) and ‘inflicting bodily injury, death, or property damage by a bullet fired from negligently mishandled firearm’ (Art. 54(17)) among 32 enumerated ‘Grave Disciplinary Offences’.

Externally, the Ethiopian Human Rights Commission (EHRC), established under Proclamation No. 210/2000 and substantially amended by Proclamation No. 1224/2020, has a mandate that extends to policing. It may ‘undertake investigation, upon complaint or its own initiation, in respect of human rights violations’ (Proclamation No. 210/2000, Arts. 6(4) and 24(1)–(2)), and may ‘visit and monitor, without prior notice, any correction centres or prisons, police detention centres or any place where people are held in custody’ (Proclamation No. 1224/2020, Art. 6(13)). This mandate has been exercised in practice (see below).

Police Compliance with the Law of Law Enforcement and Human Rights

Arbitrary arrest, detention and ill-treatment

Treaty-body scrutiny corroborates a disturbing pattern of ill-treatment of detainees. The Committee against Torture’s 2023 review found continuing, credible allegations of torture and ill-treatment in police and pre-trial custody, compounded by weak independent oversight; in its own 2023 replies to the Committee’s list of issues, Ethiopia acknowledged the need to strengthen legal safeguards against coerced confessions and other ill-treatment, including through amendments to the Criminal Procedure Code addressing fundamental guarantees for persons in detention, and stated that courts had ruled evidence obtained through prohibited means inadmissible.

The UN Human Rights Committee’s 2022 concluding observations addressed torture specifically, and in stronger terms: it found that torture and ill-treatment during interrogation and pretrial detention remained widespread, that perpetrators – including high-ranking officers – enjoyed a high degree of impunity, that courts frequently rejected objections to the admissibility of forced confessions, particularly in terrorism trials, and that Ethiopia’s domestic legislation still lacked a definition of torture fully compliant with the Covenant or the Convention against Torture.

The Ethiopian Human Rights Commission’s own findings, released in March 2024 and covered by The Reporter Ethiopia in December 2024, corroborate this at a scale and level of detail no external treaty body has matched. Its National Inquiry into Persons Deprived of Liberty, covering the five years from April 2018 and drawing on testimony from nearly ninety victims and witnesses across the former SNNPR, Amhara, Oromia, and Somali regional states, documented violations of the rights to be informed of the reasons for arrest, to appear promptly before a court, to legal counsel, and to family visitation, alongside torture, maltreatment, and prolonged arbitrary and unlawful detention. In Amhara, eighteen victims described being transferred at night to informal detention sites – including facilities the Commission found holding as many as 900, 700 and 700 people respectively at Yetnora, Tilili and Gayint – with one victim waiting 83 days for a court appearance; in Oromia, one victim reported being beaten unconscious, stripped, struck with electric cables, and left for two days in a garbage-disposal area; in Somali Region, seven members of a civic association assisting drought victims were arrested, and a separate detainee spent a cumulative year in detention across three arrests without ever appearing before a court. Regional officials’ own responses to the Commission varied: Somali Region’s deputy police commissioner denied the existence of secret detention sites and asserted that detainees were brought before a court within 24 hours, while Oromia authorities reported having prosecuted 961 police officers and released 200 people found to have been unjustly detained.

The UN Human Rights Committee’s 2022 concluding observations documented a further, distinct pattern: large-scale arbitrary detention of political opponents, protesters, human rights defenders, and journalists – this despite the adoption of Proclamation No. 1238/2021 on the media, which was intended to give journalists better protection against arbitrary detention – together with reports of enforced disappearances. The Committee found that the removal of legal safeguards during the state of emergency declared on 2 November 2021 had led to the mass arbitrary arrest and detention of several thousand people suspected of supporting outlawed opposition groups, including the mass targeting of Tigrayans in Addis Ababa and other cities, thousands of whom were subjected to prolonged arbitrary detention in camps lacking adequate food and medical care. The Committee called on Ethiopia to investigate all allegations of arbitrary arrest and detention, release and adequately compensate those detained arbitrarily, shorten the period of initial police custody to no more than 48 hours, systematically ensure access to counsel and the right to bail, and make greater use of non-custodial alternatives to pretrial detention.

More recent reporting indicates that arbitrary detention remains a live problem. In May 2025, the Federal Police Commission itself announced the detention of 47 healthcare workers during a nationwide strike, on accusations of ‘coordinating illegal strikes’ and ‘endangering patients’ lives’; Human Rights Watch separately documented cases within the same crackdown involving detention without warrant or charge and prolonged custody. The same period saw the arbitrary and, in at least one case, apparently incommunicado detention of journalists and media workers, documented below.

Protest policing and use of lethal force

The historical record of protest policing is also a significant pattern. In June 2005, following the announcement of provisional results in the 15 May parliamentary election, security forces used live ammunition against demonstrators – mostly peaceful, though some reportedly threw stones – in Addis Ababa and at universities in several other regions over three days, killing at least 26 people and injuring more than 100; a female student, Shebray Delelegne, was killed when police opened fire on a crowd attempting to block police vehicles carrying detained students. More than 1,500 students and other demonstrators were reportedly detained, many held incommunicado at facilities including the Sendafa police training college, amid reports of beatings with batons and rifle butts and forced military-style exercises. Chernet Tadesse, an investigator with the Ethiopian Human Rights Council who was arrested while collecting information on the arrests and deaths, was himself held with his whereabouts unknown, prompting Amnesty International to call for an independent and impartial commission of inquiry into the killings.

Human Rights Watch documented the use of excessive and lethal force by federal police and military personnel during the 2015–16 Oromia protests, including shooting into crowds, summary killings, mass arrests, and torture of detainees, with many of those arrested or killed reported to be children or young people. The UN Human Rights Committee’s 2022 concluding observations confirm this pattern: it found that ‘excessive use of force, including lethal force, by police and security forces remains widespread, notably in the context of protests,’ and recommended that Ethiopia ensure that all State entities mandated to receive complaints of excessive force are fully independent, that all instances of excessive force are investigated promptly, impartially, and effectively – with perpetrators brought to justice and victims granted full reparations – and that law enforcement and security forces receive effective training on the UN Basic Principles.

Contemporaneous UN thematic special procedures corroborated this same pattern. On 21 January 2016, five UN experts – Special Rapporteurs on freedom of peaceful assembly and association, freedom of expression, human rights defenders and extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, together with the Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances – stated that security forces had ‘reportedly killed more than 140 demonstrators and arrested scores more in the past nine weeks’ and voiced concern at ‘continuous reports of killings, mass arrests, excessive use of force and other abuses by security forces. By October 2016, with the toll far higher, UN experts said they were ‘outraged at the alarming allegations of mass killings, thousands of injuries, tens of thousands of arrests and hundreds of enforced disappearances,’ warned that security-force killings lacking necessity and proportionality ‘could amount to extrajudicial executions,’ cited ‘numerous reports that those arrested had faced torture and ill-treatment in military detention centres,’ and urged Ethiopia to allow an international independent commission to investigate – a request Ethiopia did not accept at the time.

A further wave of large-scale protest violence followed the 29 June 2020 assassination of popular Oromo singer and activist Hachalu Hundessa: reportedly the ensuing unrest across Oromia and Addis Ababa left at least 239 people dead and saw roughly 3,500 people arrested, according to Oromia regional authorities’ own count. Four thematic UN Special Rapporteurs issued a joint statement on 21 July 2020, at an earlier point in the unrest when they put the number arrested at around 2,000, expressing concern at ‘continuous reports of killings, mass arrests, excessive use of force and other abuses by security forces,’ and calling for security forces to be ‘reformed and trained to manage assemblies in a democratic society’ and for those responsible for civilian deaths to be held to account.

This pattern continued through 2023. Human Rights Watch documented security forces beating and shooting people who protested the demolition of homes and businesses in Shegar city, near Addis Ababa, in March 2023, and separately recorded police in Tigray beating and arresting opposition leaders and supporters who sought to demonstrate against the TPLF-led interim regional administration in September 2023 after authorities had refused to authorize the protests.

The Committee on the Rights of the Child’s 2026 concluding observations confirm that this pattern has directly affected children specifically. It expressed concern at ‘reports of alleged physical abuse, arbitrary arrests and unlawful detention during the student protest in Addis Ababa in 2023,’ and at ‘the alleged detention of more than 67 girls aged between 11 and 16 while they were protesting for their basic rights to education and healthcare in Somali Regional State in December 2022.’ It urged Ethiopia to prevent the arbitrary restriction of the freedom of peaceful assembly, prevent the disproportionate use of force, investigate these allegations, hold those responsible accountable, and ‘ensure that children are not threatened, arrested or detained for expressing their views.’ Ethiopia’s own reply to the Committee’s list of issues addresses this only in general terms, stating that the government has been ‘enhancing the capacity of security forces in relation to use of force, crowd control and peaceful protests’ and has ‘attached more importance in investing on non-lethal approaches to respond to peaceful protests,’ without addressing the 2022 or 2023 incidents specifically.

Regional Special Forces (Liyu Police) – Documented Abuses

The Somali Region’s Liyu Police has a substantial documented record of serious human-rights violations. Human Rights Watch’s 2012 report, documented extrajudicial killings by the force, and its 2018 report found that abuses attributed to the Liyu Police – extrajudicial killings, torture, rape and other sexual violence, arbitrary detention, and retaliatory attacks on communities and individuals suspected of ONLF sympathies – had continued ‘for over a decade’. This included documented torture of detainees at the region’s central prison, known as Jail Ogaden, where detainees reportedly lacked adequate medical care, family access, legal counsel and, at times, food. The same report recorded Liyu Police operations outside the Somali Region itself, including in Oromia from late December 2016, which it linked to hundreds of deaths and significant displacement, and cross-border operations in Somalia. Human Rights Watch called for an independent fact-finding mission and for the criminal investigation and prosecution of responsible officials, naming former regional president Abdi Mohamed Omar (‘Abdi Iley’) and Liyu Police commander Abdirahman Abdillahi Burale specifically, and recommended against any amnesty for crimes against humanity or other serious violations.

A 2016 Landinfo report reached a similar assessment on an independent basis: it found that the Liyu Police ‘operates with a high degree of legal impunity’ and that, according to its sources, ‘the rule of law does not exist’ in the Somali Region, recording persistent allegations of extrajudicial killings continuing after the 2012 report, including in rural areas – while cautioning that its sources were uncertain how comprehensive or systematic these later abuses were. It further recorded that the force answered directly to the regional president rather than through any distinct chain of command accountability, and that members reportedly concealed their identities during operations to avoid clan-based retaliation, itself an indication that traditional, clan-based mechanisms offered little practical accountability for the force’s conduct.

Both findings predate the regional special forces’ April 2023 dismantlement (see above), and this profile has not identified an independent, comprehensive accounting of these allegations undertaken since.

Children and street children

Ethiopian police mistreatment of children in street situations is a well-documented pattern spanning more than two decades, drawn from independent human-rights monitoring, peer-reviewed research and children’s own testimony. As early as 2001, OMCT (World Organisation Against Torture) documented Addis Ababa police rounding up destitute street children and vendors and taking them to the Kolfe Police Training Camp, forcing them through military-style drills, extracting written promises never to return to the city, and dumping some in remote areas outside Addis Ababa. The UN Committee on the Rights of the Child’s 2006 concluding observations on Ethiopia found, consistent with this pattern, that street children were victims of ‘harassment and victimization by members of the police force’. A later peer-reviewed study, based on focus-group discussions with 41 street children and in-depth interviews with 20 more in Addis Ababa in 2016, recorded children’s own accounts that police ‘consider us a pickpocket person and abuse us physically every day,’ that officers ‘had been taking their things,’ and that ‘sometimes police men had been taking them to jail without any legal background’.

More recent evidence, from Ethiopia’s own national human rights institution and from independent press reporting, describes essentially the same practice continuing. Reportedly, ahead of the African Union’s 36th Ordinary Session of the Assembly, held in Addis Ababa in February 2023, authorities detained beggars, street vendors, and other people, including children, found on the streets, in what witnesses described as a coordinated sweep to remove visible poverty from the city ahead of the summit, with some saying they were beaten. The Commission’s own chief commissioner confirmed at the time that it had ‘regularly received complaints about temporary detention of street children’ as part of what authorities characterized as ‘security and rehabilitation measures,’ and said the Commission was investigating the practice’s human-rights implications.

The Ethiopian Human Rights Commission’s March 2024 complementary report to the Committee on the Rights of the Child confirms this was not an isolated episode, finding ‘a concerning pattern of arbitrary and forceful round up and detention of children in street situation in times of religious, cultural, and public holidays or the hosting of international and continental conferences,’ with children released ‘a few days after the conclusion of the events.’ It found that ‘many of these children were detained with adults in cramped and unsanitary rooms exposing them to serious health problems, psychological trauma, and in some instances disease outbreak leading to deaths,’ and that although separate rooms existed for female detainees, those rooms lacked locks, ‘leav[ing] them exposed to possible sexual violence.’ In the Somali Regional State specifically, the Commission found that children in conflict with the law ‘are subjected to solitary confinement, beating, threat, withholding of mosquito nets, and forced labor in detention centers.’ The 2026 Committee’s concluding observations echoed this finding among its listed concerns – ‘solitary confinement, beating, threats, withholding of mosquito nets, and forced labour in detention centres’. An alternative report coordinated by Save the Children (available via OHCHR) based on interviews and focus groups with children in street situations across several regions, corroborates this qualitatively: children reported that police ‘disrespect them and beating and insulting them’, with one respondent stating, ‘we are more terrified by policemen than by a stranger.’

Crackdown on Journalists and Civil Society Ahead of the 2026 Elections

Human Rights Watch’s 2026 World Report documents an intensifying crackdown specifically targeting journalists, health-worker strike leaders, and civil society ahead of Ethiopia’s 2026 elections. Pressure escalated into direct physical violence against media staff in August 2026. On 1 August, security personnel seized and physically assaulted Addis Standard’s editor-in-chief, Yonas Kedir, holding him for approximately 24 hours of interrogation; the following day, armed security and intelligence personnel raided the outlet’s newsroom, seizing cameras, microphones, and production equipment and deliberately destroying lighting and studio equipment.

Journalists covering unrest in Tigray have separately faced violence and armed threats during the same period, though from a mix of State and non-State actors whose responsibility should not be conflated with the Addis Ababa-directed measures described above. On 27 July 2025, local militia dispersing a protest in Adi Gudem beat residents and fired into the crowd, killing one man, while militiamen pointed a gun at camera operator Meaza Wubete and shouted at fellow camera operator Sirak Assefa to stop filming or be shot; four journalists from Tigray Broadcasting Services and Tigray Public Media hid until evening and escaped disguised as villagers, abandoning their equipment. In June 2025, police in Axum detained camera operators Bereket Teklegerima and Ermias Gebrekidan for three days, on the ruling party’s local claim that they lacked work authorization and were seeking to create ‘chaos.’ On 13 March 2025, around 20 armed men identified with a rival Tigray People’s Liberation Front faction stormed Mekelle FM 104.4, pulled news programming off air, deleted critical social-media posts, and installed their own manager, and patrolled the station for several days.

Accountability and Oversight

The UN Human Rights Committee’s 2022 concluding observations expressly found both the legal framework itself and the slow pace of accountability for police, prison, and security-force perpetrators to be specific concerns; recommending that Ethiopia ‘ensure that all State entities mandated to receive complaints of excessive force are fully independent’. The Committee against Torture’s 2023 review and Human Rights Watch’s 2026 World Report reach the same conclusion from different angles, identifying the absence of independent oversight as a structural feature of Ethiopia’s law-enforcement accountability landscape. The African Commission’s most recent review – its concluding observations on Ethiopia’s seventh to tenth periodic reports, adopted in July 2025 – found the same gap persisting nearly a decade later: among its recommendations, it urged Ethiopia to ‘continue efforts to prevent and punish police brutality, excessive use of force and the culture of impunity,’ while separately, under the mandate of its Committee for the Prevention of Torture in Africa, recommending that Ethiopia ensure no equipment associated with torture or ill-treatment remains in use by law enforcement or prison authorities.

Public opinion data and the government’s own flagship reform effort tell a similar story. Afrobarometer’s January 2025 survey found only one-third of Ethiopians believe police ‘usually operate professionally and respect all citizens’ rights’, with majorities separately reporting excessive force against suspects and protesters and over a third of those who dealt with police paying a bribe – this despite a 2020 Ethiopian Police Doctrine committing to ‘demilitarize, depoliticize, decentralize, and democratize’ the force through community policing and Independent Advisory Groups. Interpeace’s account of its 27-month Addis Ababa pilot of that Doctrine reports the mechanism working; an independent academic assessment of the same pilot was more qualified, crediting real gains in community agency and crime reporting but finding them undercut by ‘political interference in local processes and the use of local meetings to silence critical voices,’ concluding that ‘the central state still seeks to control populations but also tries to improve its image’.

Individual, publicised incidents follow a recurring script that illustrates the same gap at street level. In August 2019, video showing a handcuffed man being beaten by police, and an elderly bystander who intervened being manhandled in turn, went viral; police said the episode arose from a dispute over “working rights” that escalated when the men allegedly tried to seize an officer’s rifle – a claim the footage itself did not corroborate – and the Addis Ababa Police Commission apologised and arrested the two officers involved. In August 2025, a similar video showing two officers dragging a handcuffed man along the ground near Balcha school prompted the Commission to again announce the arrest of the officers involved for conduct it said ‘drifted from professional responsibility and failed to follow principles of observing human rights.’ In neither case has this profile identified public reporting of the officers’ eventual prosecution or disciplinary outcome, so while the pattern demonstrates that the Commission’s Ethics/Discipline Committee mechanism (see Oversight, above) is capable of being triggered by public pressure, it does not by itself show the mechanism reliably completing the process through to accountability.

Risk of Diversion and Re-Export of Imported Weapons

Diversion from ENDF and other security-force stockpiles

This profile has identified a documented case of loss of control over ENDF-held imported major weapons systems during the Tigray conflict. Open-source analysis by the Oryx military-analysis blog indicates Ethiopia fielded multiple Chinese-supplied M20/DF-12 short-range ballistic missile and A200 300mm guided-rocket-artillery systems before the conflict; when Tigrayan forces overran the ENDF’s Northern Command at the outbreak of the war in November 2020, they captured the systems and reportedly obtained the cooperation of some Ethiopian operators. Oryx subsequently reported that Tigrayan forces used captured systems in strikes on Bahir Dar air base and Asmara, Eritrea; Ethiopian forces later recaptured a missile base in Tigray in December 2020 containing expended M20 missiles and emptied A200 rocket canisters. This is more precisely characterized as battlefield capture and loss of State control than diversion in the narrow sense, but it is directly relevant to the risk that imported weapons can leave government custody during conflict.

Available evidence indicates that diversion risk extends beyond battlefield capture. A 2024 study in the European Journal on Criminal Policy and Research, based on 2020 fieldwork interviews and focus-group discussions identifies several further reported mechanisms through which weapons and ammunition held by Ethiopian security institutions are said to have entered illicit circulation, including inadequate armoury supervision and weak physical security at security-force stockpiles in Harar and Shashemene, officials retaining personally issued weapons after changing posts, ammunition sold after training exercises, misuse and sale of ammunition by serving personnel, and resale of confiscated weapons.

The same study reports that, in one case, higher-ranking defence personnel based in Shashemene were said to have been prosecuted for selling government-issue PKM machine guns and sniper rifles subsequently recovered from civilians. It also records a case involving a deserted federal police officer whose government-issued firearm allegedly passed through four civilian holders before its eventual registration, and reports that weapons seized from armed actors – including in the Oromia-Somali border conflict and in Harar – were resold by the security personnel who confiscated them rather than submitted as evidence, with regional special-forces personnel separately reported prosecuted for comparable conduct.

Taken together, the available evidence identifies several distinct diversion pathways affecting Ethiopian security-force stockpiles: inadequate physical security of armouries; failure to recover individually issued weapons; diversion of training ammunition; misuse or sale of ammunition by serving personnel; desertion with government-issued weapons; and diversion of confiscated weapons, in addition to the battlefield capture documented above. The evidence does not establish the national scale of each pathway, but the existence of multiple reported pathways indicates that the risk is not confined to loss of control during armed conflict.

Diversion associated with regional security forces

The proliferation and subsequent dissolution of Ethiopia’s regional special forces created an additional weapons-accountability challenge. Before their dissolution, regional special forces maintained substantial quantities of firearms outside a uniform federal security structure: in 2021, a Federal Police spokesperson publicly acknowledged that there was no common standard governing their arms and training. The federal government’s April 2023 decision to dissolve the regional special forces therefore required the recovery, transfer, or otherwise controlled disposition of significant quantities of weapons they held.

The process was particularly disruptive in Amhara, where the approximately 30,000-strong Amhara Special Forces faced substantial resistance to integration, with some former personnel subsequently joining Fano. A 2026 study provides direct but incomplete evidence of weapons accompanying some of these defections: former Amhara Special Forces personnel who joined the insurgency were reportedly equipped with heavy machine guns, including DShK weapons, and RPGs said to have been obtained from the government and, in some cases, through extortion during the Tigray war. The study does not quantify the weapons involved or establish how many weapons formerly held by the regional forces were recovered, transferred to the ENDF or police, retained by authorised personnel, or lost to armed groups.

Illicit trafficking into and through Ethiopia

Independent assessments converge on Ethiopia having a substantial and worsening illicit small-arms trafficking problem. The Global Organized Crime Index gave Ethiopia an arms-trafficking score of 8.5 out of 10 in its 2025 assessment – among the highest in Africa – describing Ethiopia as primarily a destination country and, to a lesser extent, a transit and source country, and attributing the market’s expansion specifically to ‘ongoing conflicts in Amhara, Oromia and Tigray, increasing the availability of battlefield-grade weapons’, sustained by ‘criminal networks, state-linked actors and foreign entities who take advantage of poorly manned borders and corruption.’

A 2022 study for ISS/ENACT similarly found that illicit firearms enter Ethiopia through its borders with Sudan, Djibouti, Somalia, Kenya and South Sudan, with Turkish-made pistols and machine guns and Kalashnikov-pattern rifles moved across difficult terrain by camel, donkey and motorbike to avoid formal checkpoints, and onward trafficking continuing from Ethiopia toward Kenya, South Sudan, and Karamoja in northern Uganda. The same research reports that federal police concentrate principally on formal routes and checkpoints while regional police possess greater knowledge of informal routes, with inadequate information-sharing between the two levels limiting a comprehensive national picture of trafficking networks, and reports allegations of involvement by law-enforcement personnel and other state-embedded actors in illicit arms flows – allegations that are interview-based and do not establish the scale or frequency of such involvement.

A 2023 companion study – drawing on the same 2020 fieldwork as the 2024 study cited above, though reporting different findings from the dataset – for Addis Ababa University’s Journal of African Development Studies, provides further route-level evidence: it identifies firearms moving from Sudan, South Sudan, Kenya and Somalia toward Addis Ababa and other central Ethiopian cities before redistribution, identifies Turkish-made pistols, Kalashnikov-pattern rifles and ammunition entering from Sudan, and records several crossing points into Gambella from South Sudan, including Ethang, Abubu and Maja as well as Akobo, Lare, Jorna, Shalab and Wantabo. The latter included testimony that South Sudanese soldiers stationed near the border sold firearms to Ethiopian traffickers. These cross-border flows should be distinguished from diversion in the strict sense: illicit weapons entering Ethiopia from neighbouring States constitute illicit importation or trafficking, whereas weapons originating in Ethiopian government stockpiles and subsequently entering illicit circulation constitute diversion.

Proliferation among regional and State-linked armed groups

Ethiopia has a long-standing pattern of weapons proliferation among regional, communal, and State-linked armed groups, predating the 2023 special forces dissolution noted above. Research by ISS/ENACT found politicians and clan chiefs in southern and eastern Ethiopia supplying small arms and light weapons to their own kin groups, illicit weapons from South Sudan fuelling violence between the Anuak and Nuer ethnic groups in western Ethiopia, and illicit arms contributing to violence between ethnic Amhara and Gumuz communities in north-western Ethiopia.

The relationship between specific trafficking routes and specific conflicts should nevertheless be stated cautiously. The 2023 Addis Ababa University study identifies Benishangul-Gumuz as a significant Sudan- and South Sudan-origin trafficking corridor, naming specific entry point and weapon types, while a separate Rift Valley Institute analysis notes Gumuz militia becoming ‘well organized, trained, and armed’ over the three years to late 2022 without specifying by whom, and the separate Benishangul People’s Liberation Movement launching attacks on Ethiopian territory from bases in Sudan. This profile located no study directly tracing weapons used in the Amhara-Gumuz violence specifically back to this corridor, so the connection should be treated as plausible context rather than a documented finding.

Similarly, allegations of Eritrean training and arms supplies to Fano remain insufficiently corroborated to establish a documented supply chain: the Danish Immigration Service, citing a single interlocutor, reported allegations that Eritrean forces had trained and supplied weapons to Fano during the earlier Tigray conflict.

Ethiopian-origin weapons and downstream diversion in Somalia

The evidence for diversion of Ethiopian-origin weapons after their transfer to Somalia is considerably stronger than for diversion from Ethiopia’s own stockpiles, and should be analysed separately from it: this is downstream diversion following an authorized State-to-State transfer. UN Monitoring Group reporting from 2005–2006 documents substantial historical Ethiopian arms transfers to Somali Transitional Federal Government-aligned forces, including AK-47 rifles, RPGs, ammunition, and explosives in 2005, and further consignments of AK-47s, PKM machine guns, G3 rifles, RPG launchers and DShK machine guns in early 2006, with some of the 2005 materiel subsequently reported captured by opposing Somali forces. These reports concern reported Ethiopian transfers rather than diversion from Ethiopian stockpiles, and should be read as historical context rather than as diversion findings in themselves.

More directly relevant to downstream diversion, the UN Monitoring Group reported in 2014 that Ethiopia had supplied Somalia with a notified consignment of thousands of Type 56-2 assault rifles for the Somali National Army (SNA), and subsequently documented brand-new Ethiopian-supplied Type 56-2 rifles appearing for sale on Mogadishu’s illicit arms markets in February and April 2014, with arms dealers and SNA officers reportedly identifying Ethiopia as the rifles’ source and the Monitoring Group assessing that the weapons had leaked from SNA stockpiles through illegal sale or higher-level diversion. This account is corroborated by contemporaneous Reuters reporting on the same UN findings.

These cases do not establish diversion from Ethiopian government stockpiles, and should be read as evidence of post-transfer diversion risk associated with Ethiopian-origin weapons. A further, more recent incident illustrates the difficulty of attributing border-area weapons flows to a specific origin: the Somalia Panel reported that two trucks carrying weapons and ammunition intercepted in July 2024 near the Ethiopia-Somalia border represented the largest recorded diversion case since the lifting of Somalia’s territorial arms embargo, while expressly stating that the weapons’ origin remained unconfirmed and under investigation; this incident should not be attributed to Ethiopia without further tracing evidence.

Ethiopian territory as a conduit for third-country transfers

The American Enterprise Institute’s Critical Threats Project – citing satellite imagery and flight-tracking data – assessed with some confidence that Ethiopia has served as a supply hub and rear base for Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces (RSF) since late 2025, that it hosts at least one RSF base near the Sudanese border in Ethiopia’s Benishangul-Gumuz region, and that Emirati-linked flights carrying suspected weapons shipments to the RSF via Ethiopia have substantially increased since November 2025. The International Crisis Group has found that the RSF ‘appear to be enjoying a certain degree of free movement in Ethiopia along the border with Sudan’s Blue Nile state,’ and that unspecified reporting has documented a flow of equipment through Ethiopia to the RSF’s front in Kordofan. None of this sourcing establishes that weapons Ethiopia itself has imported are being re-exported onward to the RSF or other third parties: the pattern documented here is Ethiopian territory and airspace being used as a transit and staging corridor for third-country supply.

North Korean assistance and UN sanctions compliance

Ethiopia’s defence-industrial capacity raises a separate sanctions-compliance issue, distinct from the diversion and trafficking risks discussed above. The UN Panel of Experts monitoring the DPRK sanctions regime reported that the Homicho Ammunition Engineering Complex’s supplier list included the Korea Mineral Trading General Corporation, and, after determining that this entity was not the South Korean company it had initially appeared to be, assessed that the connection may have violated the DPRK arms embargo; Ethiopian authorities subsequently stated that the entity had been removed from Homicho’s supplier list.

Post-conflict weapons accounting: the Pretoria Agreement handovers

The November 2022 Pretoria Agreement between the Federal Government of Ethiopia and the TPLF provided for the disarmament of TPLF fighters and the handover of heavy weapons as part of the disengagement process. Ethiopian State media reported a formal handover of heavy weapons by TPLF forces in the presence of African Union monitors, and separate reporting recorded a further handover of light weapons at Mekele in May 2023 monitored by the African Union. These handovers represent a documented, if partial, mechanism for recovering weapons that left ENDF control through the conflict-capture pathway addressed above, but this profile did not identify published accounting reconciling the quantities handed over against the quantities documented as captured or lost, so the extent to which the handovers closed the gap identified by the Oryx-based inventory above cannot be assessed.

National capacity to prevent and respond to diversion

The ability to assess diversion in Ethiopia is constrained by documented weaknesses in weapons marking, record-keeping and stockpile management. The Geneva International Centre for Humanitarian Demining (GICHD) assessment of Ethiopia points to significant gaps in stockpile-management capacity; it records ‘insufficient information on cases of diversion’ and on ‘the disposal of ammunition’, and identifies continuing needs for ‘development or refinement of standards and procedures on stockpile management’ – including guidelines, training and experience-sharing – and for ‘capacity development for the destruction of surplus stockpiles.’ It also records a single training project, implemented in 2020, on digital data collection of weapons and ammunition stockpiles, aimed at improving management going forward.

Ethiopia’s 2024 national report under the UN Programme of Action on Small Arms and Light Weapons provides further evidence of this information gap. For the 2022–2023 reporting period, Ethiopia reported zero diversion incidents, zero enforcement actions against illegal SALW transfers and zero surplus SALW destroyed or collected, despite reporting that systems exist to monitor diversion and manage national stockpiles. These official figures should not be read as demonstrating an absence of diversion; rather, they should be treated as an information and reporting limitation, to be read alongside – rather than as contradicting – the independent evidence of illicit trafficking and reported diversion mechanisms documented throughout this section.

This traceability problem is reinforced by a 2023 firearms-marking and electronic-record-keeping evaluation conducted under the Regional Centre on Small Arms (RECSA) framework, which identifies the difficulty of tracing the origin and movement of firearms as a major impediment to controlling illicit proliferation, found that Ethiopia’s domestic firearms-marking capacity had eroded completely, that the unit responsible for arms and data management lacked any trained or qualified personnel to undertake marking, and recommended training at least thirty officers and providing at least sixteen additional marking machines to restore basic national marking functions. A related Small Arms Survey assessment of the RECSA national-stockpile-marking initiative confirms that Ethiopia participated in the regional effort specifically to improve traceability and prevent diversion.

Weak or absent marking capacity directly constrains Ethiopia’s ability to trace recovered or seized weapons back to their point of diversion: many of the specific pathways described throughout this section cannot currently be verified against traceable weapon markings, which is itself a documented capacity gap rather than evidence that the underlying pathways do not exist. Where firearms are not consistently marked, or electronic records do not adequately link weapons to their original acquisition and subsequent custodians, a firearm recovered from an illicit market may be difficult to distinguish reliably between one diverted from an Ethiopian government stockpile, one that entered Ethiopia illicitly from a neighbouring country, and one that entered an illicit market following an authorized transfer to another State.

Overall assessment

Taken together, the evidence indicates a significant and multifaceted risk of diversion and uncontrolled proliferation of weapons within Ethiopia, arising from multiple, partly overlapping mechanisms: documented battlefield capture of ENDF equipment during the Tigray conflict; interview-reported individual diversion cases from defence, federal police, regional police, and militia stockpiles, which could not be independently verified against primary sources; the wider redistribution of weapons associated with the proliferation and dissolution of regional security structures; and persistent cross-border trafficking that overlaps with, but is analytically distinct from, diversion in the strict sense.

The principal constraint on a more precise assessment is Ethiopia’s own documented weakness in stockpile management and weapons marking, which limits both Ethiopia’s and outside observers’ ability to trace individual weapons and to distinguish diversion from loss, capture, illicit importation or unrecorded transfer. The distinction between diversion from Ethiopian stockpiles, battlefield capture, authorised transfer followed by downstream diversion, illicit importation, and third-country transit should therefore be maintained throughout the ATT risk assessment. Addressing the documented weaknesses in stockpile management, weapons marking and record-keeping would strengthen Ethiopia’s ability to prevent, detect and investigate diversion, while improving the traceability of weapons recovered from illicit circulation.