The eleven people at the centre of this investigation are not a random sample of misfortune. They are a historian, journalists, physicians and academics, elected officials, an opposition Member of Parliament, the chairman of a legally registered political party. What they have in common is not a crime. It is a vocation — to record, to heal, to teach, to represent, to speak — and an identity. Each was detained after doing, publicly and lawfully, the thing that defined them.
This is the written companion to our film Voices Behind the Walls. Where the film gives a face and a name to eleven detained people, this investigation adds what a ten-minute film cannot carry: the paper trail — charge sheets reviewed by press-freedom monitors, court dates, the proclamations under which people are held — and the wider pattern into which each case fits. Every factual claim below is attributed to a named, publicly available source; the numbered references are at the end. Where a detail rests on a single source, it is flagged. This is an argument built from the public record. It is not a court verdict, and it does not pretend to be one.
01 · The premiseEleven names, and the machinery behind them.
Read one case and it looks like an injustice. Read all eleven and a structure appears. The same state of emergency recurs as the legal trigger. The same anti-terrorism proclamation recurs as the charge. The same handful of prisons recur — Kaliti, Kilinto, Awash Arba. The same defence lawyers appear across nominally unrelated files — Henok Aklilu, Solomon Gezahegn — because the pool of lawyers willing to take these cases is small. And the same choreography of process recurs: arrest first, legal basis assembled afterwards; hearings closed to the press; charge sheets left vague and amended late; court orders — for medical care, for bail, even for a defendant simply to be produced in the courtroom — issued and then ignored.
This investigation makes three claims, in sequence. First, that these detentions follow a motive: people are imprisoned for who they are and what they do, not for what they have been shown in a fair and open court to have done. Second, that the motive operates at collective scale: the eleven are the visible fraction of a far larger detained population. Third, that the trap is sealed: the people who might have contested this at the ballot box, reported it to the public, or defended it in court are behind the same walls — up to and including, as the most recent case below shows, the authority of the Supreme Court itself being enlisted to ratify a seizure carried out by masked men at a prison gate.
02 · The elevenWhat the record shows, name by name.
Each entry gathers what could be verified from named sources — dates, charges, courts, and the documents a moving image cannot show. Reference numbers point to the source list at the end.
03 · The machineryOne emergency, one proclamation, three prisons, a method.
Behind eleven individual files sits a single, reusable apparatus. Nearly every 2023 arrest above followed the state of emergency declared in the Amhara region on 4 August 2023, after the federal government moved to dissolve the regional special forces and the Fano militia took up arms. The emergency's Command Post arrested elected officials without their immunities being lifted, party chairmen without warrants, journalists without stated reasons or court appearances. When the emergency finally lapsed in June 2024, its function was laid bare: three journalists held for months under its provisions — Bekalu Alamirew, Tewodros Zerfu and Belay Manaye — were released within days of its expiry, without charges ever having been brought, after a court ordered police to answer for the legality of their imprisonment. [16]
The recurring charge is the Proclamation on the Prevention and Suppression of Terrorism. Its central feature, in these cases, is its breadth: in the charge sheets reviewed by CPJ, its capital provision — punishing those who "terroriz[e] or spread fear among the public … with the intention of advancing political, religious or ideological causes" — was applied to journalists for their reporting. The proclamation does not require the state to prove a bombing or an assassination; it requires it to characterise speech, association or reporting as terror. That is the mechanism by which a newsroom becomes a "media propaganda wing," a forwarded text message becomes "enabling attacks," and a YouTube channel's founder becomes a "deputy coordinator" of an armed council. [12][18]
Three prison names recur. Awash Arba, the desert military camp — "Ethiopia's Guantanamo," in the words of a joint diaspora statement — used for incommunicado holding under the emergency: Tadele, Buayalew, Kebede and Zewdu all passed through it. Kaliti and Kilinto, the prisons in and around Addis Ababa where the terrorism defendants are concentrated for their years-long trials. The concentration is itself evidence of a system rather than a series of coincidences.
And across the files, a shared choreography, each step documented above in at least one named case. Arrest precedes legal basis: Tadele was arrested seven months before parliament removed his immunity; Buayalew's was never lifted; Kebede was taken without a court order. Courts are defied: judges ordered medical treatment for Tadele and Buayalew, and the prison invoked "security concerns" until surgery became unavoidable — then returned both men to cells within hours, still bleeding; a judge's arrest warrant against a police officer who twice refused to produce Kebede is the measure of how little even a courtroom order means. Charge sheets stay vague and arrive late: the collective case against Meskerem Abera was twice suspended over the defence's demand that the prosecution specify actual facts, and the November 2024 "amended" charge sheet, as CPJ observed, named people allegedly affected by incidents without detailing those incidents. Dormant cases are revived: Abera's December 2022 file slept fifteen months, then woke to produce a sentence shorter than the time she had already served — which is as close as a court comes to admitting the detention, not the verdict, was the point. And when all else fails, force overrides the courts — as at the gate of Kilinto on 25 February 2026. [12][11]
04 · The scaleFrom eleven to three hundred — and beyond.
The eleven are a window, not the whole. The evidence for scale is uneven by design — internet shutdowns, barred courtrooms and frightened families keep the true number from being counted — but every available figure points the same way. The single collective charge sheet of 7 June 2023 named 51 defendants. The case registered under Yohannes Buayalew's name counts 52 accused, of whom 14 were produced at the closed Lideta hearing of March 2024 while police were tasked with locating the rest. The US State Department's 2023 country report documented "numerous reports of enforced disappearance" connected to the Amhara and Oromia conflicts. A December 2024 appeal signed by fifteen diaspora organisations spoke of "thousands of Amhara political prisoners" and named, beyond this film's eleven, further detained physicians and academics. [12][6][15][3]
"Tens of thousands of alleged pro-Amhara activists have been jailed since the start of the year." Reporters Without Borders, on 2023 alone
And the machinery did not stop. Human Rights Watch's World Report 2026 records that in August and September 2025 authorities "arbitrarily arrested at least six journalists and media workers, holding some incommunicado," and that on 13 August 2025 masked gunmen, some allegedly in military uniform, abducted Yonas Amare, a senior editor at The Reporter. In April 2026, CPJ reported that Addis Standard's managing editor, Million Beyene, was taken from his newsroom by unidentified men after the outlet's registration was revoked. The eleven sit inside a continuing, widening practice that reaches into the present. The film's careful formulation — at least three hundred political prisoners connected to the Amhara crackdown — rests on the tallies of the detainees' lawyers and monitoring associations. Against RSF's "tens of thousands," it is almost certainly an undercount. [26][27][19]
05 · The law, and its limitsWhat can, and cannot, be claimed.
The detentions described here implicate obligations Ethiopia has accepted. Prolonged arbitrary detention and denial of due process breach the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which Ethiopia has ratified. The withholding of medical care from detainees in life-threatening condition engages the prohibition of cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment. The seizure of Sisay Awgichew at the prison gate placed him, for days, outside the protection of the law with his fate unacknowledged — the constitutive elements of an enforced disappearance under the 2006 International Convention. And the systematic prosecution of journalists under capital terrorism provisions for acts of journalism sits squarely within what the UN and African human-rights systems have repeatedly condemned as the abuse of counter-terrorism law to suppress expression.
The honest limits must be stated plainly: to date, no court and no UN commission of inquiry has issued a binding finding that the treatment of Amhara detainees constitutes a specific international crime. The UN International Commission of Human Rights Experts on Ethiopia, in its final 2023 report, was explicit that its work was incomplete — and was then allowed to lapse. This investigation therefore builds an argument from the public record, drawing on the UN Office on Genocide Prevention's Framework of Analysis for Atrocity Crimes as a lens, not a verdict.
The counter-arguments, fairly stated: the government's position is that these are security cases arising from a real armed insurgency. That much is true as far as it goes — the Fano conflict is genuine, and armed actors on multiple sides have committed abuses; Human Rights Watch's 2026 report documents Fano forces themselves abducting and killing teachers in Merawi. A serious investigation holds both facts at once: an armed conflict is real, and the imprisonment of a historian, journalists, physicians, a party chairman and elected auditors of the executive for their public work is not explained by it. The test is not whether a conflict exists. It is whether these specific individuals were shown, in fair and open proceedings, to have done what they are accused of. On the public record, they were not. [26]
06 · The filmVoices Behind the Walls.
This investigation is the written companion to the documentary Voices Behind the Walls, produced under the banner of the Global Amhara Diaspora Diplomatic Task Force (GADTF) in collaboration with AAGE — Amhara Advocacy Group in Europe. The film runs ten minutes and thirty seconds, in English with French and Amharic subtitles. No individual is credited on screen: the work is carried collectively by GADTF, by deliberate decision, to protect its authors and their families. Where this investigation gives you the charge sheets and the court dates, the film gives you the faces attached to them — and the authenticated audio of Genet Asmamaw's arrest.
Watch the full film on the @AmharaDiplomacy channel. A companion page with the eleven case files is in our Documentary section.
07 · What this meansCounting what the system is built not to count.
The purpose of naming eleven people is not to suggest that only eleven matter. It is to make legible a practice designed to be illegible. A state that shuts down the internet during operations, bars the press from hearings, holds people in desert camps, revives dormant cases after fifteen months, and sends masked men to a prison gate to undo a court's bail order is a state that has invested in not being counted. The answer to that is not to match its scale — no diaspora association can independently enumerate every detainee — but to make each verifiable case impossible to dismiss.
Institutions — the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, the European Parliament, the African Union — act on documentation, not on outrage. A named person, an attributed source, a court date, a charge-sheet detail: these travel further into the rooms where decisions are made than any adjective. The eleven are chosen because their cases can be stood behind, line by line. Behind them stand the hundreds — by RSF's account, the tens of thousands — who cannot yet be named.
The walls in the title are literal — Kaliti, Kilinto, Awash Arba. But they are also the walls the system builds around information itself: the shutdown, the closed courtroom, the charge sheet that names victims without naming incidents. This investigation, and the film it accompanies, are an attempt to put a window in that wall. What is on the other side is not eleven stories. It is one.