This archive report was first published on 9 August 2019.
On August 9, 2019, Human Rights Watch reported that Eritrea is forcing thousands of students and teachers into indefinite national service, driving many into exile and frustrating hopes that a peace deal with Ethiopia might end conscription.
Teenage students are systematically subject to hard labor at an isolated military camp near the Sudanese border, with many also enduring physical abuse, the rights group said in a report.
Laetitia Bader, the report's author, stated, “Eritrea's secondary schools are at the heart of its repressive system of control.”
She added, “Now that peace with Ethiopia is restored, reforms on human rights, starting with the rights and freedom of the country's youth, need to follow.”
Eritrea has run a system of universal conscription for more than two decades, with the government justifying mandatory national service by invoking a “no peace, no war” stalemate with neighboring Ethiopia after a border conflict from 1998 to 2000.
Despite the peace deal signed in July 2018, Eritrea has not made any meaningful changes to national service or to its system of repression, the HRW said.
Conscription drives thousands, including many unaccompanied children, to leave the country each year. Its population is around five million, and the United Nations estimated in late 2018 that a further 500,000 Eritreans were refugees.
One Eritrean refugee said he had attended the military camp at 17 and was jailed after trying to leave the country and his assigned job. “There is no escape...unless you flee,” he told Reuters on condition of anonymity.
