On January 5th, the Ethiopian Parliament adopted the controversial Charities and Societies Bill. The bill had been pending before parliament for several months and met the opposition of national and international civil society groups for it aims to further limit the work of independent organisations. The new law makes it virtually impossible for civil society organisations to carry out work that the government does not approve.

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The provisions of the new law seriously curtail the already limited work of human rights defenders in Ethiopia and drastically reduce their ability to criticise or act independently of the government, through the imposition of arbitrary restrictions on their work, complex bureaucratic procedures, severe criminal penalties and escalated government surveillance of their activities.

International and domestic pressure has resulted in the delay of the bill and multiple revisions have taken place since the original text was drafted. Despite those revisions, however, the text is in many ways more repressive than the original draft. The law greatly expands the range of areas of work that foreign and foreign-funded organisations are forbidden to work on such as gender issues, children's rights and the rights of disabled people. Ethiopian organisations receiving more than 10% of their funds from abroad are now considered as foreign organisations and are therefore banned from working in human rights, governance, gender and other issues. The new law carries criminal penalties for any violation of its provisions. Furthermore, it provides for the creation of the Charities and Societies Agency (CSA) to oversee the management and general conduct of all CSOs in Ethiopia. The CSA is granted very broad discretionary powers to refuse legal recognition to CSOs on very vaguely defined grounds, to disband those CSOs which have already been given legal status and to subject CSOs to intrusive surveillance.