Eritrea has publicly rejected the latest UN Special Rapporteur report on the country, calling it methodologically weak, dependent on unverified allegations, and detached from conditions on the ground.

In a statement delivered in Geneva on 15 June, Ambassador Sophia Tesfamariam told the UN Human Rights Council that the report relied too heavily on anonymous sources while giving too little weight to material from UN agencies and other institutions that have documented progress in health, education, infrastructure, food security, and socioeconomic development.

According to the statement, Asmara argues that the report elevates claims from a narrow circle of outside actors into accepted fact without sufficient corroboration. Eritrea said that repeated allegations do not become evidence merely through repetition, and that the resulting framework falls short of the objectivity and evidentiary rigor expected of credible UN reporting.

National service at the center of the rebuttal

A major section of the intervention focused on Eritrea’s national service programme. The statement described national service as a sovereign institution established under Proclamation No. 82/1995 to protect independence, territorial integrity, and national security while also promoting self-reliance and social cohesion.

Eritrea argued that the continuation of service beyond the statutory 18 months has to be understood in the context of long-running external security threats and unresolved regional tensions. The statement also pointed to renewed debates over conscription and national service in several European states, saying Eritrea is being denied a sovereign policy space that other countries continue to claim for themselves.

Pushback against a country-specific mandate

Asmara also challenged the Special Rapporteur’s argument that the mandate remains the only meaningful international monitoring mechanism for Eritrea. Tesfamariam said this ignores the broader UN system, including the Universal Periodic Review, treaty bodies, specialised agencies, and other intergovernmental processes through which member states are already assessed.

The speech framed the report as part of a recurring cycle in which the same allegations are reproduced annually without meeting a higher evidentiary standard. Eritrea’s position is that this weakens the legitimacy of the country-specific mechanism rather than strengthening international accountability.

Why this matters

The Geneva exchange matters because it shows how Eritrea is continuing to fight the human-rights file on both legal and political grounds: not only rejecting the findings, but rejecting the logic of the monitoring framework itself. For Asmara, the issue is no longer just the content of a single report, but the credibility of a mandate it sees as structurally biased.

Whatever view one takes of Eritrea’s domestic record, the statement marks a clear attempt to move the argument away from slogan-level accusations and toward questions of evidence, methodology, sovereign consistency, and whether country-specific scrutiny is being applied evenly across states.

Source: Statement delivered by H.E. Ambassador Sophia Tesfamariam during the Enhanced Interactive Dialogue on the Situation of Human Rights in Eritrea, Geneva, 15 June 2026, published by Shabait on 16 June 2026.