Eritrea, the small eastern African country near Ethiopia, considered one of the most isolated in the world, is carrying out extrajudicial killings and is torturing, the United Nations human rights head said Monday.
Navi Pillay, the human rights chief, estimated that between 5,000 and 10,000 political prisoners are being held in the country.
“Arbitrary detention, torture, summary executions, forced labor, forced conscriptions, and restrictions to freedoms of movement, expression, assembly, and religion,” is rampant in the country, she said, according to a transcript.
Human rights organizations say that Eritrea, headed by former Marxist revolutionary Isaias Afewerki, has one of the most repressive regimes in the world, consistently ranking low on press freedom indexes published by groups including Reporters Without Borders.
“My office provided a list of potential areas of cooperation that the proposed mission could discuss with the government, and asked for the mission to be facilitated before June,” Pillay said. However, Eritrea has not replied to her requests, she added.
Eritrea fought a border war with Ethiopia between 1998 and 2000, killing 70,000 people and forcing the displacement of hundreds of thousands more.
Tensions between the two increased in January after five Ethiopian tourists were killed, and two were kidnapped near the border. The Ethiopian government said two months later that it carried out an attack on Eritrean soil, targeting what it described as terrorists.
