Minority Rights. An Assessment of the Rights to Electoral Participation and Representation of Non-Territorial Minorities in Ethiopia

Scientific Essay from the year 2013 in the subject Sociology - Individual, Groups, Society, , language: English, abstract: This paper attempts to assess the rights to electoral participation and representation of non-territorial minorities in Oromia Regional State/Ethiopia. In doing so, secondary documents like, journal articles, books, Magazines and reports were used. Data's were also collected from different Medias and newspapers to get the full picture of the study issue. Accordingly, the paper generalizes that the Oromo use the regional autonomy for complete identification of their ethnic group and the nonterritorial minorities clearly lack legal and institutional protection in the regional states.Ethiopia designed ethnic based federal state structure to respond to the challenges of minorities by developing a counter-majority institutional system. However, the ethnic based federal state structure also creates local tyranny which will further complicated the challenges of minority rights at the local constituent unites of the federation. More importantly, the ethno-territorial organization of the federating unites of Ethiopia left a number of non-native peoples of the country out of the constitutional recognition under the regional constitutions. As one of the regional states of Ethiopia, Oromia Regional State, the largest in size and number of residence, is the major regional state which large number of non-territorial minorities are found. The allocation of home land for each major ethnic group in the country complicated the right of these dispersed non-territorial minorities in the regional state.