Ethiopian High Court’s Institutional capacity, bleak: Clients

ESAT News

July 30, 2013

 Clients of the Ethiopian High Court have said that the institutional capacity of the court is at a critical state. They said the Court has moved down both in quality and capacity terms. They also said that the current High Court has been worse than the former regime’s Kebele Courts.

The Ethiopian High Court deals with financial and material cases and at times also courts criminal cases. The Court has no proper sanitation and electric generators that serve when power blackouts occur affecting the legal processes.

Some of the other problems that the clients stated are: giving verdict before evidences were sufficiently gathered, cancelling impounding orders and helping suspects to sell their properties and flee, selecting and removing files from charge files, some staffers of the Court, who also act as brokers, influencing judges on their decisions, failure of judges to pay attention and seriously  read charge files, and attempting to establish contact with clients involved in cases that involve huge sums of money.  Judges have also complained that they are given too many cases and files to handle and stated that they sought the Administration to appoint additional human resource.

In related news, it has been leant that a serious problem is being observed in the purchase of land in Addis Abeba. Many people that have purchased and retained a map have found themselves in conflict with other people that presented similar rights of possession.