AAGE — Amhara Advocacy Group in Europe
Documentation, research and advocacy for civilian protection in Ethiopia's Amhara region.
AAGE — Amhara Advocacy Group in Europe
Documentation, research and advocacy for civilian protection in Ethiopia's Amhara region.
AAGE — Amhara Advocacy Group in Europe — is a research and advocacy consortium documenting human rights violations in Ethiopia's Amhara region and advocating for civilian protection from European capitals. Since 2023, AAGE has produced four documentary films, more than ten formal open letters and statements to international institutions, original research investigations, and a continuously-updated record of documented drone strikes.
AAGE is a publishing research consortium. We document, verify and publish — in long-form investigations, in documentary films, in continuously-updated datasets, and in formal statements addressed to European institutions and international human rights bodies. Our work has been ongoing since 2023, regardless of organisational shifts in the surrounding diaspora landscape: the documentation cannot wait.
The work begins where the press cannot enter. Since August 2023, the Amhara region has been under telecommunications blackout. Independent journalists have been excluded; field reporting has stopped; the everyday machinery of accountability has been silenced. The consortium has been built to hold a record where institutional record-keeping is being prevented — not as a substitute for the Ethiopian press, but as a witness from outside the blackout.
Concretely, we publish four bodies of work: Investigations (long-form research reports built from cross-verified institutional sources), the Drone Strike Monitor (a continuously-updated dataset of documented incidents), Documentary films (research investigations in audiovisual form), and Reports (statements, open letters and briefings issued by the consortium and its member associations).
AAGE documents violations against civilians in Ethiopia's Amhara region. We work on this specific constituency because the diaspora associations we are part of have first-hand access to witnesses, families, survivors and local documentation networks. The information reaches us through trusted channels that international press — excluded from the region since the August 2023 telecommunications blackout — cannot currently access.
This editorial focus does not imply that other communities in Ethiopia are not suffering. Civilian harm attributed to other parties of the conflict, in other regions, is documented by partner organisations whose work we cite and respect — including Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, ACLED, the OHCHR, the International Crisis Group, and the Ethiopian Human Rights Commission. AAGE's specialisation is Amhara civilian protection, drawing on the access our networks provide. It is not exclusive of, and does not compete with, parallel documentation work on other constituencies.
AAGE operates within the federating context of the Federation of Amhara Associations in Europe (FAAE), a network of Amhara civic associations across European countries — including France, Germany, the United Kingdom, Norway and others. Each association is a registered community organisation rooted in its host country, with its own governance and its own programmes for the Amhara diaspora.
FAAE was constituted in 2023 to coordinate advocacy work towards European institutions. The federation is currently in restructuring; AAGE continues its publication work throughout, with editorial independence within the broader diaspora frame: editorial decisions are taken by the AAGE research team. Member associations supply field information, witnesses and translators; they do not direct editorial line. This separation is deliberate and constitutive.
We document. We verify. We do not embellish. Each figure published on this site is sourced; each source is cited; each contested claim is held against at least two independent records before it appears in print or in film. Where evidence is incomplete, we say so. Where institutions disagree on a number, we cite the divergence rather than choosing the most striking version.
We are aware that the suffering we document does not need rhetorical amplification. The figures, when accurately stated and properly sourced, carry their own weight. We have made it a discipline of the consortium not to add literary force to material that is already devastating in its plain form. Survivors’ names are not used without consent; survivors’ images are not shown without consent; medical detail is kept to what underlying institutional sources have already published.
Our methodology is described in detail on the Methodology page, including our sourcing standards, our source-protection protocols, our editorial oversight, our corrections policy, and the production tools we use — including our use of synthetic voices for narration, and the reasons we use them.
We are independent of states, of political parties, and of corporate funding. The consortium accepts no advertising on this site. It receives no funding from the Ethiopian government, from any other state, or from any party engaged in the conflict it documents. It has no contractual relationship with any commercial media organisation that would constrain its editorial line.
We work on volunteer labor. There is no paid editorial staff. The cost of producing this site, of producing the films, and of running the verification network is carried by the member associations and by the personal time of the consortium’s contributors — researchers, translators, designers, civic activists. This is not presented as a virtue. It is presented as a fact, because that fact shapes what we can do and what we cannot do.
We are not a press agency, a litigation body, or a humanitarian aid service. We do not publish breaking news. We do not represent victims in legal proceedings. We do not deliver assistance in the field. Where readers need those services, we point them to the institutions that provide them — the Ethiopian Human Rights Commission, OHCHR, Physicians for Human Rights, partner NGOs in the field, and the network of diaspora associations that the Federation coordinates.
The Amhara diaspora is a network rather than a single organisation. The Federation of Amhara Associations in Europe works alongside sister bodies in North America — including the Amhara Association of America (AAA), whose continuous documentation of drone strikes is referenced extensively in our work, and the Global Amhara Diaspora Diplomatic Task Force (GADTF), with which most of the consortium’s documentary films have been co-produced.
We coordinate, share data, and cross-reference each other’s findings. Where a partner organisation’s record differs from ours, we cite both. Where a partner has primary documentation we do not have, we credit them and link to them. The point is not institutional rivalry but a shared task of holding the record together — in Europe, in North America, and wherever Amhara communities have been able to preserve a witness from outside the blackout.
The consortium can be reached at [email protected] for general correspondence, at [email protected] for press and media inquiries, at [email protected] for research partnerships, and at [email protected] for civil society and institutional cooperation. A structured contact form, including an explanatory note for sources and witnesses, is available on the Contact page.
For institutional partnerships with member associations of the Federation, please specify the relevant country in your inquiry and we will route you to the appropriate national contact.