Reproductive Violence in Tigray

Note: This article contains descriptions of extreme violence.

A new July 2025 investigative report highlights the devastating weaponized sexual and reproductive violence unleashed during the 2020-2022 Tigray conflict in Ethiopia in which the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) and Ethiopia’s federal government devolved into open war. Fighting began when TPLF forces attacked a federal army base in Tigray, prompting a massive counteroffensive by the Ethiopian National Defense Force, which allied with neighboring Eritrean troops and regional Amhara militias, armed paramilitary groups drawn from Ethiopia’s Amharan ethnic community (such as the Fano militia).

Based on hundreds of medical records and health worker testimonies, the report documents mass rape, sexual slavery, forced pregnancy, and sexual torture of Tigrayan women and children by Ethiopian and Eritrean soldiers. The deliberate reproductive dimension of violence in Tigray constitutes clear violations of both the Maputo Protocol and international law, amounting to war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Reproductive violence as a weapon of war in Tigray

Reproductive violence is a distinct form of gender-based violence intended to destroy or control a victim’s reproductive capacity and reproductive autonomy. Thousands of Tigrayan women and girls have suffered extreme reproductive violence explicitly aimed at preventing them from bearing children. While reproductive violence often occurs through acts of sexual violence, it is crucial to recognize that even instances typically classified solely as sexual violence can carry an intentional reproductive dimension.

Specifically, in the Tigray conflict, sexual violence perpetrated by Ethiopian National Defense Force (ENDF) and Eritrean soldiers has consistently targeted victims’ reproductive organs, highlighting a deliberate strategy to inflict permanent reproductive harm. In many documented cases, soldiers gang-raped women and then mutilated their reproductive organs by forcing foreign objects into their wombs. In one instance, a young mother was raped by soldiers who inserted eight rusty screws, a pair of nail clippers, and a written note into her uterus. The note, penned by the perpetrators and left inside her body, proclaimed: “We will make Tigrayan females infertile…From now on, no Tigrayan will give birth to another Tigrayan”. These atrocities were not isolated. Medical records reviewed by independent experts reveal a pattern of such cases, indicating a deliberate campaign of reproductive violence to destroy Tigrayan women’s fertility.

Beyond acts of mutilation, other forms of reproductive violence were widely reported. Survivors describe rapes intended to cause unwanted pregnancies and the denial of medical care afterward, including detention of some victims for months to prevent them from accessing abortions. Women were sexually enslaved in military camps, often gang-raped repeatedly over weeks or months, with captors refusing them contraception or treatment, effectively forcing pregnancies under captivity.

There are also reports of enforced sterilizations, such as fighters injecting women with unidentified drugs or inflicting injuries likely to render them infertile. In one case, soldiers even cut a fetus from a pregnant woman’s womb, an act of unfathomable brutality meant to eliminate a future Tigrayan life. Each of these measures has been commissioned within the environment of an armed conflict and used as a weapon of war against Tigrayans, with especially horrific impacts on women and girls. The physical and psychological trauma is profound: survivors have suffered chronic pain, infertility, fistulas, PTSD, and social stigma, amounting to “severe and long-lasting” harm.

Violations of the Maputo Protocol

Ethiopia is a state party to the Protocol to the African Charter on the Rights of Women in Africa, better known as the Maputo Protocol. Adopted by the African Union, the Maputo Protocol is a landmark regional treaty guaranteeing women’s rights – including special protections for women in armed conflict. Ethiopia’s conduct in Tigray violates the Protocol’s provisions, particularly Article 11, which protects women’s rights during armed conflict. Article 11 requires States to prevent and condemn gender-based violence against women in war and to ensure such acts are prosecuted as serious international crimes. Specifically, Article 11(3) mandates that States “protect asylum-seeking women, refugees, returnees and internally displaced persons, against all forms of violence, rape and other forms of sexual exploitation,” and ensure that such acts are considered war crimes, genocide and/or crimes against humanity and that their perpetrators are brought to justice.

Ethiopia has failed to uphold these obligations in Tigray. Rather than protecting women and girls, Ethiopian state forces (often alongside allied Eritrean troops and Amhara militias) were themselves the primary perpetrators of rape, sexual slavery, and other gender-based atrocities. Far from providing a safe haven, the Ethiopian military and its proxies subjected Tigrayan women, including internally displaced civilians, to widespread and systematic reproductive violence solely because of their gender and ethnicity. This is a direct breach of Article 11, which obliges the State to shield women from such violence. The Maputo Protocol was created with recognition of women’s particular vulnerabilities in conflict; yet in Tigray, women were deliberately targeted for horrific abuse. As Amnesty International purports, “rape [was] used as a weapon of war to inflict lasting physical and psychological damage” on Tigrayan women. Such disproportionate violence against women is exactly what Article 11 seeks to prevent.

Further, Ethiopia has continuously failed to bring perpetrators to justice. Article 11 of the Protocol demands not just prevention but also punishment of offenders. While the Tigray war raged, Ethiopian officials denied or downplayed the atrocities. Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s government initially dismissed reports of Eritrea’s involvement in the conflict, deeming the incidents as “fabrications” and even obstructed independent investigations. Only under international pressure did the government acknowledge some abuses. To date, however, accountability has been grossly inadequate. In early 2021, the government admitted that just three soldiers had been convicted of rape (and one of murder), with a few dozen others charged – out of thousands of alleged perpetrators. By the government’s own account, as of May 2021 only 28 soldiers were on trial for killing civilians and 25 for rape or sexual violence. No high-ranking officials or commanders have been held responsible. Indeed, Ethiopia worked to terminate the UN-mandated Commission of Inquiry on Tigray, which was disbanded in 2023 under Ethiopian lobbying. This deliberate shielding of perpetrators violates the obligation under Article 11 to prosecute offenders before competent courts.

Further, African human rights bodies have stressed that state inaction in the face of sexual violence is itself a breach of women’s rights. In a 2020, a decision by High Court of Kenya (citing the Maputo Protocol) held the Kenyan government liable for failing to investigate and prosecute post-election rapes, and ordered compensation to survivors. Ethiopia’s failures are even more egregious: not only did it fail to protect Tigrayan women, but its agents also actively perpetrated the abuse, and the state then failed to provide remedies. Such failure to ensure transitional justice triggers Article 25 of the Maputo Protocol as well, which requires States to ensure victims can access justice and reparations. To date, Tigrayan survivors have received neither adequate justice nor reparations.

Notably, a coalition of NGOs has lodged a formal complaint at the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights, accusing Ethiopia of violating both the African Charter and the Maputo Protocol in Tigray. The complaint catalogs crimes including sexual/reproductive and gender-based violence, and argues that Ethiopia bears responsibility for acts by its forces and allied militias. The Maputo Protocol’s standards provide a clear yardstick: sexual and reproductive violence in conflict is not a mere disciplinary issue. It is a serious human rights violation and an international crime. By failing to prevent, punish, or even acknowledge the reproductive violence in Tigray, Ethiopia violates its commitments under Article 11.

Sexual and reproductive violence as crimes against humanity and war crimes

Beyond breaches of African regional law, the atrocities in Tigray amount to breaches of international law, as United Nations experts and human rights organizations have concluded.

First, the widespread and systematic nature of these gender-based abuses amounts to crimes against humanity under Article 7 of the Rome Statute. A crime against humanity involves the commission of certain underlying acts (such as rape, sexual slavery, torture, enforced sterilization, etc.) as part of a widespread or systematic attack against a civilian population with knowledge of the attack. In Tigray, the reproductive violence was of a massive scale, organized, and directed against Tigrayan civilians on ethnic and gender grounds. The UN’s International Commission of Human Rights Experts on Ethiopia (ICHREE) has found that rape, sexual slavery, and sexual torture were committed as part of a large-scale attack on the Tigrayan civilian population, constituting crimes against humanity. Critically, attacks on the individual’s reproductive autonomy appear to have been an integral factor of the campaign against Tigray, not random acts of rogue soldiers. Survivors consistently recount soldiers using ethnic slurs and explicitly linking their assaults to an eradicationist motive.

Second, the atrocities committed Tigray amount to war crimes. The two year conflict in Tigray was a non-international armed conflict (NIAC) between Ethiopia (with Eritrean support) and the Tigray People’s Liberation Front. In such conflicts, Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions and customary international humanitarian law prohibit violence to life and person, cruel treatment, torture, and outrages upon personal dignity (especially humiliating and degrading treatment). Rape and other forms of gender-based violence are universally recognized as war crimes, constituting outrages upon personal dignity and often torture. Additional Protocol II of the Geneva Conventions – to which Ethiopia is party – explicitly forbids rape, enforced prostitution and indecent assault in internal conflicts.

In the Tigray conflict, fighters gang-raping women, mutilating their genitals, and enslaving them for months engaged in “cruel treatment” and “outrages upon dignity” of the most extreme sort. Many rapes were accompanied by extreme brutality. Women were beaten, burned with hot metal or acid, and mutilated during or after the assaults, amounting to torture and inhuman treatment. Crucially, there was a clear connection to the armed conflict: many perpetrators were uniformed soldiers (ENDF or Eritrean Defense Force) committing these acts in occupied towns and military camps, explicitly as part of the campaign against the Tigrayan population. Victims were often chosen because they were Tigrayan (the “enemy” ethnicity) or as retaliation against perceived support for the Tigray fighters. The armed conflict enabled and served as the context for the crimes, satisfying the requirement that war crimes be closely related to the conflict. International observers have affirmed that the documented rapes and sexual slavery in Tigray amount to war crimes by all warring parties. Even rare acknowledgments by the Ethiopia’s Attorney General have conceded that soldiers had committed rape and killing of civilians, implicitly recognizing those as unlawful acts in war.

Conclusion

Fair labelling of Ethiopia’s reproductive crimes is critical as these grave violations of international and regional law establish the necessity of legal reprisal and accountability. Notably, the African Union-brokered Pretoria peace agreement of 2022 between the Ethiopian government and Tigrayan authorities explicitly included a pledge to establish a transitional justice mechanism to address atrocities committed during the conflict.

This ongoing process requires a genuine transitional justice process for Tigrayan women. Any such process, to be credible, must explicitly recognize and address the reproductive dimensions of the violence committed against Tigrayan women. Both international law and regional African law condemn the gendered crimes committed in Tigray and demand that survivors receive justice and redress. The African Union, working together with the UN and international partners, has a duty to respond.