Deportation of Ethiopians from Saudi in 2013
ESAT News (August 25, 2017)
The Human Rights Watch says Saudi Arabia should halt the deportations of Ethiopians from the Kingdom until it can establish refugee status determination procedures for those at risk of persecution, who are fleeing repression back home.
“Should expulsions be carried out—as during an earlier expulsion of irregular migrants in 2013, many thousands of Ethiopians who should have refugee protection could be forcibly returned home to face the persecution they fled,” writes Felix Horne, HRW’s senior researcher for the Horn of Africa.
There are an estimated 10 million migrant workers in Saudi of which up to 500,000 are Ethiopian nationals, according to HRW. “While many of the Ethiopians in Saudi come for economic reasons, a significant number arrived after fleeing serious abuses at the hands of their government,” Horne said.
“Most of the Ethiopians we interviewed who were part of the 2013 Saudi expulsions were detained within a week of their return to Ethiopia. And most of those were tortured in detention. All had originally left Ethiopia because of Ethiopian government human rights violations. Since they were unable to claim asylum in Saudi, their fate was sealed when they were deported.”
Human Rights Watch said it has also documented detention and torture of forced Ethiopian returnees who had been living in Kenya, Egypt, Uganda, Djibouti, Somalia, and elsewhere.
“During Saudi’s 2013 expulsions, over 160,000 Ethiopians were returned. Human Rights Watch documented various abuses in the deportation process, including xenophobic attacks, beatings in detention, and horrendous detention conditions.”