The Quest for Election and State of Emergency in Ethiopia: An Appraisal on Related Constitutional Issues in Focus

Abstract

Ethiopia has been sharing the evils and vices of COVID_19, which is the deadly viral pandemic and spreading across the world without any territorial restriction. Almost every nation-state has got started responding to prevent it so as it has become highly preventive to discover its curative medicine, even vaccine till now. Accordingly, Ethiopia has enacted an emergency decree in order to ignite the possible preventive measures, amid, prohibition of mass gathering, stay-at-home, physical distancing, discontinuing any face to face teaching-learning process, etc. Due to this fact, the upcoming national election has been postponed under such elements of surprise that the election process can pay the way for further communicability of this pandemic and result the worst scenarios instead of its worthiness. This makes the sixth election period that has to be conducted every five years to get additional time of extension, which has initiated Constitution issues of how to do so i.e. the question of reason and time together. Besides, the office term of the House of People Representatives (HoPR) is also put under question by superseding it what would be the fate of the country after expiry of the parliament office since there is no room in the Constitution to extend its office term. Thus, this article is meant to analyze the appropriateness of the options put forward by the government, i.e. the dissolution of HoPR, constitutional interpretation, amendment and emergency declaration over election with other collateral issues under consideration. In doing so, strict digest of universal norms, constitutional principles and jurisprudential point of view of the state of emergency have been consulted. Aftermath, it aims to reveal the common ground for mutual consensus amicably. Finally, it has come up with emergency decree that should be the governing law with the point of no reservation once it is declared under an element of legitimate situation.