This petition drive is an appeal to world conscience, global international organizations, human rights institutions, peace loving organizations, professional progressive unions, civic, religious, and gender-based institutions as well as ordinary human beings, who in one form or another, yearn for peace and justice.

The initiator of this petition is the Global Ethiopian Alliance for Peace and Justice (GEAP) and it is facilitated by Solidarity of Nations of Ethiopia (SONE). The appeal for petition is based on the gross human rights violations and genocide perpetrated by the Abiy Ahmed Government, and it is instructed by the principles and directives of the Geneva Convention on Genocide of 1948 and the Rome Statute of 2002.

The genocide committed in Ethiopia since 2019 to date (and continuing) is by far the worst in the world in the 21st century.In Tigray alone over 600, 000 persons were killed. (Some reports contend that this number goes up to one million.) Millions more were displaced and have not returned to their home to date. The genocidal war in Tigray (2020-2022) wascommitted with a clear intent to exterminate the Tigrayan people. The intent was made manifest in the statements by the Prime Minister, his advisors, the military generals, senior officials, prominent artists, business leaders, and ordinary individuals. Several international bodies (the UN’s included) have documented these crimes and the genocidal intent behind them. There has been no attempt at making the perpetrators accountable so far. 

Similarly, the regime’s war in Oromia (2019-todate),involving indiscriminate massacres of civilians and combatants, claimed the lives of tens of thousands of civilianswho were not only extra-judicially executed en masse but also burnt alive when whole villages were set on fire with the people inside them, the military taking video clips in front of burning huts. This campaign was motivated by the desire of Abiy Ahmed’s regime to wipe out the Oromo people in order to eliminate the Oromo Liberation Army (OLA). A prominent government official, Fekadu Tessema, was clear about this desire when he made the statement in the Caffee Oromiyaa (Oromian Parliament) saying, “We need to drain the sea in order to kill the fish” alluding to the Oromo people as the seaand the OLA as the fish.

Similar genocidal assaults were conducted on the Sidama and Wolaita to quash the popular call to form their own regional State in the Ethiopian federation (as per the provisions of the Constitution). The massacre in Sidama in 2019 claimed over 167 lives just in one day. In Wolaita, over a hundred were killed in a similar feat.

The Qemant and the Agaw had lived with such massacres for a long time but this was elevated to a genocidal level in 2018 and 2019 when entire Qemant villages were targeted in Northern Gondar. Similar tactics of killing, burning people alive in huts when setting fire on wholevillages, weaponizing rape, looting and vandalizing properties were adopted by the regime unscrupulously..

The same genocidal war tactics are employed by the regime as they continue to inflict horror in the Amhara region since 2023.

While the ordinary people try to resist the regime’s war in all regions and while they keep calling for the international community to help stop the wars and hold the perpetrators accountable for their crimes of genocide, ethnic cleansing, war crimes, crimes against humanity, weaponised rape, looting, pillaging, vandalising and destruction of properties, etc), to date, there seems to be no meaningful measures taken in this regard.

Consequently, it became the responsibility of ordinary individual Ethiopians (most of us families of victims and survivors of genocide) to do what we can to bring the matter to the attention of the international community and the international justice system.

We strongly believe that bringing the Ethiopian officials (starting from Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed) to the International Criminal Court (ICC) would provide an important signal that there will be justice and accountability, that there will be no impunity for mass atrocity crimes, that the lives of millions of innocent persons lost in Abiy Ahmed’s genocidal wars will be properly accounted for, and that a just peace shall be established eventually.

We urge the ICC to start investigating the matter as urgently as possible. We call on all concerned international human rights lawyers to join us and help us bring Abiy Ahmed and members of his government to justice in accordance with the Genocide Convention and the Rome Statute on ICC.