There was a time when a report by Ethiopia’s human rights commission was a staid affair, its findings offering window-dressing for hand-wringing donors and legal cover to the government. Between 2013 and 2017 the commission systematically “whitewashed human rights violations through compromised methodologies, dismissing credible allegations”, according to a 2019 Amnesty International study that accused it of “brazen bias against victims”. But no more. In May the commission published the latest in a string of important investigations into human rights abuses in different parts of the country, focused on detention conditions in police stations across Oromia, Ethiopia’s largest region and home of its Nobel prize-winning prime minister, Abiy Ahmed. Officials responded with two press conferences in which they denounced the commission for what they called “biased and unbalanced” statements, and threatened to obstruct its work in future. It was the latest salvo towards the commission’s new boss, Daniel Bekele, who returned to Ethiopia in 2019 from New York, where he had worked for Amnesty and before that led the Africa Division of Human Rights Watch (HRW). Over the past two years Daniel has beefed up the commission’s investigative capacity, enhanced its legal autonomy and helped turn it into something approaching a proper watchdog. It has won the support of international donors and – significantly though controversially – teamed up with the UN’s top human rights body for a joint investigation into alleged atrocities and crimes against humanity in Ethiopia’s war-ravaged Tigray region. “The commission is increasingly being perceived as a genuinely independent national human rights institution,” said Daniel, in an interview with the Guardian. He points to a number of achievements since he took the reins. Formally, at least, the body has more independence from the ruling party in the way that commissioners are selected, as well as in the hiring and firing of staff. Previously, almost all commissioners were ruling party members, but this is no longer the case. Daniel says practical autonomy – seen, for instance, in the commission’s freedom to make unannounced prison visits – has improved, helping to secure more access for political prisoners to lawyers and relatives last year. “The operational space for the commission to begin its work in a fairly independent manner [has grown] in the sense that even with the limited capacity we’ve been able to build over the past year we’ve been able to do independent investigations and documentation and reporting, some of which is very critical of government offices or security officers,” he said. Perhaps most importantly, the commission released a statement on 26 February, which endorsed the findings by Amnesty on a massacre of civilians in the Tigrayan town of Axum, which happened shortly after the war between Abiy’s government and the region’s ruling party, the Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), began in November. The statement confirmed the presence of allied Eritrean troops in Tigray – then still officially denied by Ethiopian authorities – and blamed them for the killings in the city. The full report published in March provoked outcry among Ethiopian and Eritrean government supporters, who had long rejected any criticism of their forces’ conduct in Tigray. On 10 May, a statement from the attorney general’s office contradicted the commission’s findings by claiming that those killed in Axum were in fact TPLF combatants in irregular fatigues. (A subsequent statement conceded that at least 40 of those killed were indeed civilians.) “There are a good number of officials which have responded positively to our recommendations but unfortunately some officials have been very dismissive,” said the commissioner. “It’s always very difficult when you work in a highly politically polarised environment: you cannot avoid the perception that you are paying attention to one situation rather than another. We get accused by all different ethnic groups.” Especially damaging has been the growing perception among Tigrayans, about 6% of Ethiopia’s population, that the commission is partial towards the federal government and hostile to the TPLF. Comments by the commissioner early on in the war significantly downplayed its humanitarian impact, but the perception is also due to his personal background: in 2005 Daniel was arrested and imprisoned for more than two years after he denounced elections as rigged. At that time the TPLF spearheaded the federal government as part of a repressive multi-ethnic coalition called the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front. Critics claim this has coloured his perspective on the war in Tigray, a charge he dismisses: “I personally know that nothing in my experience would affect my independence – if anything, it makes me more committed to human rights work and gives me better insight into the nature of human rights challenges in Ethiopia.” Yet a report alleging that at least 600 mostly Amhara civilians were killed in the town of Mai Kadra by a TPLF-aligned militia in November continues to dog the commission. Critics note that the report – rushed out within days and seized on by the Ethiopian government – relied almost exclusively on the testimony of Amhara witnesses in a place where both Amhara and Tigrayan people had lived. Tigrayan refugees who fled to camps in Sudan told reporters and aid workers of attacks on Tigrayans at the same time. Daniel had expressed scepticism of such accounts, suggesting some of the refugees may have been perpetrators of the massacre and advising caution toward “some of the narratives emerging”. But, after the commission’s own interviews with Tigrayans, he concedes the report may “come across [as] one-sided”. “It is true there were also reprisal attacks but at the time we did not have enough information to document and report on that,” he said. “The problem in a polarised political environment is that the different political actors tend to pick and choose which of your reports they want to use to advance their political message.” For now, though, such concerns are secondary. The joint UN investigation –which includes probing the events in Mai Kadra among others – will be a litmus test for the commission’s independence as well as the Ethiopian government’s commitment to full accountability. But the challenges are daunting: many Tigrayans in Ethiopia and abroad have outright rejected the commission’s participation. “The Ethiopian government has repeatedly failed to hold perpetrators of abuses and violent crimes across the country to account,” said Laetitia Bader, Horn of Africa director for HRW. “In Tigray, given ample evidence of atrocity crimes by warring parties, the complexity of the crimes that need to be investigated, and the importance of ensuring that the investigations and their outcome are seen as credible, an impartial, international investigation is key.” By contrast, the commissioner is adamant that local participation will aid the investigation and help win consent for an international investigation at a time of rising hostility in Ethiopia towards what is seen as foreign meddling. “I understand people not having confidence in state institutions in Ethiopia, because state institutions in Ethiopia have a history of not being independent or impartial,” Daniel said. “But on the other hand we have started a process of trying to build independent institutions and I believe the Ethiopian human rights commission is one of them. “It is right that an Ethiopian human rights violation should be addressed by an Ethiopian human rights institution, in partnership with our friends and partners.”