(Oromedia, Finfinnee, 14 September, 2011), our sources in the Ministry of Justice discloses that TPLF’s Government is preparing new draft law by which Identification Card can be issued to all Ethiopian nationals in the country and administered.
According to these sources, the background research and the preparation of the draft legislation have already been completed in order to promulgate the proclamation, which has the official name of Vital Statistics and Registration Proclamation, intends to regulate the issuance and administration of Identification Card.
According to our sources since this draft proclamation directly targets Oromos, Somalis and Eritreans. Our sources reveled that when this law is proclaimed as law, those who does not hold this identification card will not able to get basic services that one should get to live in that country.
According to our sources TPLF’s Government wants to prepare the law that severely limits the issuance of identification Card to members of ethnic Oromo, Somalis and Eritreans because currently TPLF considers the members of these groups of people as a serious threat to "National Security”.
Our sources said that "identifying and targeting citizens in their own country as a threat of national security to their own country is a new trend. Furthermore, our sources commented that "According to international law and customs one may consider aliens or foreigners as the threat to national security but it is unique to TPLF’s Government to deem its own people or citizens as the threat of national security”
According to this new draft proclamation, the members of ethnic Oromos, Somalis and Eritreans may not be entitled to get the Identification Card without which they cannot get any basic service they should get as the citizens or residents of that country.
A legal scholar on Ethiopian legal system, who did not want to disclose his name, gave his comments on this new draft law to Oromedia by saying that "if a citizen cannot get an unlimited right to get the Identification Card within his own country, then his rights to get the benefit of being a citizen, his right to live in peace, learn, and prosper in his own country is unjustifiably limited.”
According to the legal analysis of this legal scholar, "those groups of peoples who are targeted by this draconian draft law are assumed to be non citizens if they fail to present evidence that shows they are citizens.” According to this scholar, having such kind of legal presumption in Ethiopia, where is are no proper system of registration of vital events, does not genuine motives than creating the situations in which millions of citizens remained without any legal status in their own home or country. This scholar also added that "if this law is promulgated and get legal status, it will be one of the best examples of immoral and dangerous piece of legislations in modern Ethiopian legal history”
