CASE STUDY ONE In November 1995 an Eritrean national, Solomon Ghebre Haile Michael (40), was arrested in the exclusive Harare suburb of Gunhill near the villa of the deposed Ethiopian dictator Mengistu Haile Mariam, and subsequently charged with offences relating to an alleged plot to kill Mengistu. Solomon Michael had been shot and captured by Mengistu’s bodyguards; his alleged accomplice, another Eritrean man named Abrahama Goietom Joseph Kinfe (35), was arrested the following day. At Solomon Michael’s trial in July 1996, he told the court that after he had been shot he was taken to Mengistu’s house where the former dictator told him that he would personally execute him unless he confessed to having planned an assassination; he was brutally tortured – including blows to his right arm where he had been shot - and taken to a civilian hospital, where the torture continued, including beatings, while he was refused medical treatment except for being placed on a drip. He was then told that he was being taken away to be executed, but was deposited in a military hospital where he was chained to a bed and threatened with an injection with blood tainted with the virus HIV. Solomon Michael was sentenced to 5 years imprisonment for illegal weapons possession. Abrahama Kinfe was sentenced to 10 years for conspiracy to murder. In mitigation, he had said that he had come to Harare to kill Mengistu and avenge the deaths of his family who had been killed by him and his security men; he had himself been put up against a wall in Mengistu’s palace in the Seventies and severely wounded by gunmen taking pot shots at him. Like Solomon Michael, Abrahama Kinfe also said the police had severely tortured him after his arrest in Zimbabwe. On appeal in April 1998, the Supreme Court upheld the convictions but cut the men’s jail terms to two years each; as they had already served more than this the court ordered their immediate release. The sentences were reduced because of the “highly mitigatory features” of the case: both men and their families had suffered torture under Mengistu’s rule in Ethiopia and it was not disputed at their trial that they were the victims of a brutal dictatorship that “killed thousands of people in order to break their will and wipe out any resistance” to Mengistu. The Supreme Court also accepted that both men had been severely tortured after their arrest in Zimbabwe. [Sources: Sapa 16 November 1995; Sapa-AFP 8 July 1996; Sapa-AP 24 April 1998: S v Michael S-59-98; S v Kinfe S-6098.] Mengistu still has safe-haven in Zimbabwe to this day, nearly 15 years after fleeing Addis Ababa. The Zimbabwe authorities have never taken any steps against the torturers of Solomon Michael and Abrahama Kinfe. 3