Ethiopia hands lengthy prison terms to Muslim activists

The defendants, who all denied the charges, were arrested in 2012 on charges of plotting to stage attacks to create an Islamic state in Ethiopia, which has a sizable Muslim minority.

The defendants, who were given between seven and 22 years behind bars by the Ethiopian Federal High Court, had already been in custody for almost three years and had been barred from some civic activities for five years.

The state-run EBC television station said their sentences would run from when they were first detained.

The government denied the allegation.

Mr Obama called on the government to improve it record on human rights, while praising it as an “outstanding partner” in the fight against militant Islamists in neighbouring Somalia. But Ethiopia’s ruling party, which has governed for the past 24 years, has been widely accused of rigging elections and intimidating voters.

The Ethiopian Individuals’s Revolutionary Democratic Entrance, led by Desalegn, and its allies secured all the parliamentary seats within the nation’s Might 24 basic elections, which lacked any viable competitors or oversight by Western observers.

Ethiopia’s government has often been accused of stifling dissent.

The Muslim’s Arbitration Committee was originally set up to help settle differences between the government and Ethiopia’s sizeable Muslim community.

The Ethiopian government, however, claims there is a rising threat of hardline Salafism in the country.

An Ethiopian court on Monday slapped four leaders of a local Muslim group, a journalist and 13 others with hefty jail terms for “incitement” and “terrorism”.

Nearly 34 % of Ethiopia’s 83 million individuals are Muslims. The government also allegedly sought to influence the operations of the Awalia mosque in Addis Ababa, according to Human Rights Watch.

“There appears to be no restrict to the Ethiopian authorities’s use of its anti-terrorism regulation and unfair trials to cease peaceable dissent”, Leslie Lefkow, deputy Africa director of Human Rights Watch, has stated. “The government’s treatment of these Muslim leaders bears the hallmarks of a politically motivated prosecution”.