Gerrymandering and Extraterritorial Voting Right in Ethiopia

 Submitted by TIBEBU HAILU JEMANEH with academic mentor YONATAN FESSHA

University of the Western Cape

PROJECT TEAM 

TIBEBU HAILU JEMANEH. Tibebu is a comparative constitutional law student at the University of the Western Cape in South Africa. He holds an LL.B. from Hawassa University in Ethiopia and has specialised in human rights monitoring, investigation, and advocacy in both conflict and out-of-conflict settings. He also managed election observation and monitoring missions during the 2021 national election in Ethiopia. Currently, he serves as the Director at the Ethiopian Human Rights Commission, where he oversees the commission's mandate on the rights of persons with disabilities and older persons.

DR. YONATAN FESSHA is professor of Law and the research chair on constitutional design in divided societies at the University of the Western Cape. His teaching and research focuses on examining the relevance of constitutional design in dealing with the challenges of divided societies. He has published widely on matters pertaining to but not limited to federalism, constitutional design, autonomy and politicised ethnicity. His publications include books on “Intergovernmental relations in divided societies” (Palgarve), “Ethnic diversity and federalism: Constitution making in South Africa and Ethiopia” (Ashgate) and ‘Courts and federalism in Africa: Design and impact in comparative perspective’(Routledge).  He was a Marie Currie Fellow, a Michigan Grotius Research Scholar and recipient of the Andrew Mellon postdoctoral fellowship. He was also a visiting scholar at the University of Sydney, University of Québec à Montréal, Norwegian University of Science and Technology and the University of Barcelona.

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: 

Submitting my thesis, entitled ‘Gerrymandering and Extraterritorial Voting Right in Ethiopia: Accommodation or Exclusion?’, for this year’s Student Minority Projects Challenge excites me, as I believe it provides a valuable contribution in devising institutional design for minority protection. The thesis has 35,297 words and was conducted under the supervision of Prof Yonatan Fessha to complete my LLM in Comparative Constitutional Law at the University of the Western Cape. The thesis investigates the electoral design of the Harari Regional State, the smallest subnational unit in the Ethiopian federation, which involves the gerrymandering of electoral districts, the reservation of legislative seats, and the extension of special voting rights. The thesis aims to assess whether these arrangements support meaningful protection for minorities or contribute to structural exclusion. It ambitiously combines doctrinal analysis, comparative perspectives, and contextual historical-political inquiry. The thesis elucidates both the concomitant benefits and exclusionary features of the electoral design. Although the design adopted to empower the minuscule Harari people, it contributes to the relegation of the numerical majority of the State into a political minority. While the design ostensibly adopted to redress historical cultural inequalities by empowering Hararis through preferential political rights, it has ended up replicating the very injustice it claims to remedy for non-Harari residents. Demonstrating such a dynamic impact of the design informs policymakers to reimagine alternative designs that accommodate both minority and the majority's interests. As the thesis suggests, expanded suffrage, as opposed to limited suffrage, regular diagnosis and drawing of Harari electoral maps, and abolishing arrangements that entrenched ethnic-based voting rights would elevate the political status of non-Harari residents, thereby ensuring their representation in the State council. 

Report.pdf to found here