Virtually all the countries in eastern Africa have been cited for human rights abuses in 2024, with indications that they are getting worse.
A World Report 2025 by Human Rights Watch (HRW), released on January 16, has indicted the governments of Sudan, Kenya, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Uganda, and Tanzania for increased human rights violations.
In Kenya, the HRW report says that since the youth protests began in June 2024, the authorities restricted the right to peaceful protest in heavy-handed crackdowns against nationwide protests over the high cost of living.
“President William Ruto publicly threatened the courts for making decisions unfavourable to his administration. The authorities have rarely investigated or prosecuted law enforcement officers implicated in human rights abuses,” the report says.
On June 31, a preliminary report of the state-funded Kenya National Commission on Human Rights (KNCHR) said that police had killed at least 60 protesters and abducted another 66 people.
Currently, the biggest issue is the continued abduction of the youth critical of the Ruto government on social media by hooded men, which both the president and the inspector general of police maintain are not part of the security personnel.
According to KNCHR, there have been thirteen (13) more cases of abductions or enforced disappearances in the last three (3) months bringing to eighty-two (82) the total cases since June 2024. Seven (7) of the recent abduction cases were reported in December 2024 with six (6) of them still missing, bringing to twenty-nine (29) the total number of persons still missing since June 2024.
The HRW report says that bodies of people showing signs of torture continued to turn up in rivers, forests, abandoned quarries, and mortuaries.
The authorities have yet to investigate or prosecute anyone for these crimes, given that Kenya has a history of police brutality and a lack of accountability for serious abuses by security forces.
The Commission strongly condemns these abductions which fall outside the dictates of the Constitution. “Abductions are torture, cruel, degrading and inhuman treatment. They have no place in a democratic state like ours! The Commission warns that if these patterns of abductions continue, then we shall be rapidly retrogressing back to the dark days of our history when such attacks were primarily to inflict fear on any person critical of the Government,” KNCHR said in a statement.
In Sudan, both the army chief, Abdel Fattah Al-Burhan and the leader of the Rapid Support Force (RSF), Mohamed Hamdam Dagalo have been sanctioned by the US State Department for war crimes and crimes against humanity in the ongoing war.
As of September, over 25 million people faced acute food insecurity, yet only about half of the humanitarian response plan was funded. More than 17 million children are out of school, and people with disabilities face additional challenges, given the limited humanitarian response.
The HRW report says that both parties willfully obstructed aid. The country’s health system has been decimated, with repeated attacks and incursions into hospitals as well as ongoing occupations of healthcare.
“Both parties have violently attacked, harassed, and unlawfully detained local volunteers. These violations and crimes occurred in a context of impunity given the parties’ ongoing failure to hold their forces accountable,” the report says.
Human Rights Watch verified two videos posted on pro-SAF accounts in January and March showing drones attacking unarmed people in civilian clothes in Bahri, then under RSF’s control; the two incidents killed at least one, possibly two people, and injured four or five others.
Both warring parties have deliberately targeted local responders through intimidation, unlawful detentions, violent attacks, and other abuses. Dozens of local responders were killed. The RSF have in several instances sexually assaulted local responders.
From April, North Darfur experienced intense bouts of fighting. The RSF and allied militias first attacked villages near El Fasher, the state capital. At least 43 villages were burned by June. They then imposed a siege on areas under their control around El Fasher, still in place at the time of writing, contributing to a catastrophic humanitarian situation.
In Ethiopia, the human rights situation remained dire, with government forces, militias, and non-state armed groups committing serious abuses in conflict-affected areas and elsewhere throughout the country.
Fighting between the Ethiopian military and militias in the Amhara region resulted in hundreds of civilian deaths and injuries, including attacks against refugees and civilian infrastructure such as hospitals.
The government renewed a sweeping state of emergency for the Amhara region, but its provisions were applied throughout Ethiopia; mass arrests persisted once it expired.
Authorities harassed, surveilled, and detained journalists, human rights defenders, and outspoken figures, creating an increasingly hostile and restrictive reporting environment.
The armed conflict between the Ethiopian military and Fano militia in the Amhara region continued throughout 2024, with warring parties committing war crimes and other serious abuses.
In Amhara, government forces carried out extrajudicial executions, sexual violence, torture, and ill-treatment against civilians, and used drones and heavy artillery against civilians, according to the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) Fano militias were also responsible for killings of civilians, attacks on civilian objects, and unlawful arrests.
In Tigray, Eritrean government forces committed rape and sexual violence against women and girls and abducted, and pillaged civilian property in areas they occupied.
In Eritrea, “Patterns of gross human rights violations, including the widespread use of arbitrary and incommunicado detention and enforced disappearance persist unabated” in Eritrea, the UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Eritrea, Dr. Mohamed Abdelsalam Babiker, told the UN Human Rights Council.
Despite consistent concerns being raised about the dire rights situation across the country, he reported there had been “no indications of any measures taken to improve” it.
Eritrea remains one of the only countries in the world to have never accepted a visit by a UN-independent human rights expert, and the country has consistently ignored recommendations made by UN experts.
Civic space within Eritrea is completely closed: no independent media, independent civil society organisations, or political opposition parties can operate within the country, resulting in little to no checks on the executive.
In South Sudan, after the government failed to meet conditions to hold general elections scheduled for December 2024, the HRW report says authorities severely restricted the rights to freedom of expression, association, peaceful assembly, and movement. Journalists, activists, critics, and political opposition members faced intimidation, arbitrary arrest and detention, torture and other ill-treatment.
The parliament approved a law retaining broad powers for the abusive National Security Service (NSS), despite efforts by some lawmakers to review its most contentious provisions.
The humanitarian situation remained dire, driven by years of conflict, intercommunal violence, food insecurity, and the climate crisis. The arrival of hundreds of thousands fleeing conflict in Sudan, including South Sudanese refugee returnees, Sudanese, and other nationalities, compounded the crisis.
The obstacles to political space included the requirement that parties and civil society obtain permission from the NSS for public events and the government’s failure to set up key institutions, such as the Political Parties Council which should register and oversee operations of parties.
The United Nations Commission on Human Rights in South Sudan noted that delaying elections would compound the country’s human rights crisis if leaders do not change course.
The report says that the NSS continued to unlawfully detain perceived government critics and severely restricted rights. Victims of NSS abuses have no credible, far less effective, avenues to seek redress.
On July 3, a parliamentary majority passed amendments to the 2014 National Security Service Act retaining the agency’s powers of arrest without a warrant.
In Uganda, the human rights environment remains restrictive, with the government clamping down on free expression, peaceful assembly, and dissent. Opposition leader, Kiiza Besigye is currently undergoing trial before a martial court after being abducted last year in Kenya and rendition to Uganda
In addition, authorities have arrested and charged individuals for criticising officials online. Protests against corruption have been met with mass arrests. Environmental activists face ongoing harassment and arbitrary arrests for opposing large-scale oil projects like the East African Crude Oil Pipeline.
Since May, authorities arrested at least 81 environmental rights defenders who protested against large-scale oil projects in the country. On June 4, plainclothes Uganda People’s Defence Forces (UPDF) officers reportedly detained Steven Kwikiriza, an environmental rights defender, in an unknown location. Five days later, his captors abandoned him by the roadside 250 kilometers from Kampala, having beaten him severely.
In Tanzania, authorities intensified clampdowns on the political opposition in 2024. Police arbitrarily arrested, detained, and carried out extrajudicial killings and enforced disappearances of party leaders and supporters during rallies and other people near the North Mara gold mine.
Over a week in August, police arbitrarily arrested hundreds of opposition party Chama cha Demokrasia na Maendeleo (Chadema) supporters ahead of an International Youth Day celebration in Mbeya. Those arrested included Chadema party chairman Freeman Mbowe, former presidential candidate Tundu Lissu, and several journalists.
The report says that restrictions on free expression, including social media censorship and arrests under cybercrime laws, persist. The government continued the forced eviction of the Indigenous Maasai community in Ngorongoro.
The Tanzanian government continued to implement a resettlement plan that forcibly displaced over 100,000 indigenous Maasai herder communities from the Ngorongoro Conservation Area (NCA).
The communities were forcibly relocated to Handeni district, Tanga region, about 600 km away, with little or no consultation. Since 2021, authorities substantially reduced the availability and accessibility of public services, including schools and health centres, in the NCA.
A Human Rights Watch report in July found that the restrictions, including access to cultural sites and grazing areas, and a ban on growing crops, have severely impacted residents’ lives and livelihoods, forcing many to accept relocation.
