Examining Sanctions Regime and the Systemic Adversity Applied on Eritrea’s Sovereignty: A Contextual Imperative

The discourses surrounding Eritrea, particularly in mainstream policy and media circles, have too often been stripped of essential context, resulting in a diagnostic failure. To address the symptoms, be it concerns over national service or civil liberties, without a rigorous audit of the causal environment, & to isolate any single aspects of its governance and subject it to a clinical, decontextualized audit, is not simply an analytical failure; it is a form of political malpractice and warfare. It perpetuates a narrative that is incomplete & even actively subversive. A genuine inquiry must begin by acknowledging the sustained, multi-front pressures that have shaped the nation's trajectory since its hard-won independence. The true starting point is not a checklist of internal conditions, but a frank acknowledgment of the sustained, multi-front assault on Eritrea’s sovereignty that has dictated its reality for generations.

This piece seeks to corroborate the argument that Eritrea's internal policies are inextricably linked to a prolonged state of externally imposed insecurity, unjustified and illegal sanctions, and a campaign of strategic isolation. The conversation about Eritrea is broken, and it is broken by design.

The international community was no passive bystander when law was subordinated to geopolitics, and in endorsing that foundational breach, it crossed the threshold from witness to accomplice. The collective silence following Ethiopia’s outright rejection of the final and binding 2002 ruling of the Eritrea-Ethiopia Boundary Commission (EEBC) was a deafening silence that broke the camel’s back. By choosing geopolitical convenience over law, the international community and especially the “Guarantors of the Algiers Peace Agreement of 2000” (African Union, European Union, United Nations and the US Government) underwrote the occupation of sovereign Eritrean land for over two decades. This sent a wrong signal to Ethiopia accelerating the unraveling of immediate peace in the Horn of Africa region. A poor, and new nation, having secured its legal rights, was told its sovereignty was negotiable. The consequence was not abstract. It meant a permanent state of militarized alert, with periodic skirmishes as a constant reminder of the unresolved threat. In this environment, the extension of national service from a developmental project into a cornerstone of national security and the prioritisation of sovereignty was not a policy choice made in a vacuum. It was a forced adaptation to an aggression the international community facilitated. As a result, the strain on Eritrea, a developing and newly established nation, was catastrophic to say the least.

As mentioned above, the precise point of fracture was created on April 13, 2002, when the EEBC gave a “final and binding” determination of the border dispute. This led to the delimitation decision of the boundary between the two countries based on clearly identified coordinates. It awarded the symbolic town of Bademe to Eritrea. Ethiopia, the aggressor in the war, had signed the agreement that explicitly stated, “the determination of the boundaries was to be an end to the claims of both sides.” Yet, by September 2002, Ethiopia rejected the ruling. It demanded “dialogue” before “implementation,” a unilateral rewrite of the treaty terms.

Here is the complicity: the United Nations Security Council, and the three key veto powers within it - the United States, United Kingdom, and France - sidelined the binding ruling they had guaranteed, issuing a resolution, Resolution 1434, that simply “noted” Ethiopia’s rejection and urged “dialogue,” proof that the law was unambiguous but the will to enforce it was nonexistent. The law was clear; the political will to uphold it was absent. This was not a minor diplomatic delay. It was the green light for an occupation of sovereign Eritrean territory resulting in a permanent, active violation of territorial integrity that the UN Charter is itself designed to prevent. The “final and binding” verdict was rendered meaningless by the very powers entrusted as guarantors of the post-war peace. This single act of bad faith is the cornerstone of every subsequent claim of a “state of siege.”

The Eritrea architecture of securitization was built rationally, not arbitrarily from that breach of justice. Consider the timeline:

• The EEBC ruling was flouted from 2002 onward.
• Ethiopia’s military remained entrenched in Eritrean territory.
• In 2003, the UN Peacekeeping Mission (UNMEE) reported “a precarious and potentially volatile situation.” Skirmishes were not theoretical; they were recorded incidents, such as the Tserona clashes in 2003,
• The increasing militarization of the UN monitored Temporary Security Zone (TSZ) and multitude of other violations.
• For Eritrea, a country with small population size that had lost close to 19,000 lives in the 1998-2000 war, the existential threat was ongoing and real.

In this context, the national service program, initiated for post-war reconstruction, transformed in scope and duration. It was no longer a civic project but the essential manpower reserve for a nation under explicit military threat. The “six-month” service became indefinite because the occupation remained indefinite. As the Eritrean Ministry of Information has documented, the original 1992 National Service law was conceived merely as a "long-term contingency plan" to buttress a small professional army in the event of war, "improbable as it seemed in those times." It was Ethiopia's 1998 invasion, and subsequently its 2002 rejection of the EEBC ruling, that forced the policy's adaptation. Thus, the direct link is evidenced by policy. The state of siege was not a political preference; it was the enforced reality of a lawless international environment.

Simultaneously, the second front opened: weaponisation of sanctions for economic strangulation rather than as a solution. After blocking enforcement of the law, the UNSC applied western-backed sanctions that crippled Eritrea’s ability to focus on growth and development. In December 2009, under Resolution 1907, the UN Security Council imposed, what it termed as “arms embargo and targeted sanctions”, citing Eritrea’s alleged support for Al-Shabaab in Somalia, a claim the subsequent UN Monitoring Group reports would repeatedly find lacking conclusive evidence [UN Monitoring Group reports, 2010-2017]. The procedural posture around the report reflected an emphasis on pressure and conditionality, creating the impression that compliance was expected to follow enforcement as clearly expressed by one UNSC member, “we need to teach Eritrea a lesson to comply.” Each one of them (especially US and UK) was also involved behind the scenes in a regime-change strategy.

This engineered insecurity was then compounded by economic strangulation dressed up as diplomacy. This was not a neutral punishment for bad behaviour; it was a deliberate brake applied to a country demonstrating an inconvenient model of resilience. One must ask, boldly, who benefits from preventing such a model from taking root? The sanctions answered that question. They amplified the hardship of every citizen, ensuring the economy could not breathe under the weight of both militarization and financial isolation. Eritrea’s response was “self-reliance.”

The true impact of the sanctions was financial and total trade blockade. The sanctions banned “all economic resources” from being made available to certain entities that played the lion’s share in the national economy, but the chilling effect was universal to all sectors of its economy and social protection programmes. The Development Bank of Eritrea, Commercial Bank of Eritrea and the Housing Bank of Eritrea that were critical to infrastructure projects, trade and money markets were listed for sanctions. Remittance channels, which were the only lifeblood of a diaspora-supported nation were severed or driven underground and massively impaired the health services and social protection programmes.

According to World Bank data, Eritrea’s GDP growth, which had been volatile in the post-war period registered a sharp contraction from 8.7% in 2008, plummeted to 0.3% by 2011 and remained anemic for years [World Bank, Eritrea Economic Update 2015]. While the precise annual figures have been subject to varying interpretations, the trajectory is unmistakable: an economy that had shown resilience was, following the 2009 sanctions regime, placed under severe structural strain. Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) in the growing mining sector, a potential economic engine, was scared off by compliance risks imposed because of the sanctions. Ironically, the sanctions were supposed to be targeted. The World Bank’s 2015 Eritrea Economic Update stated plainly: “The country faces significant external challenges, including UN sanctions.” This was not a side effect; it was the core objective. To make the cost of defiance, that is, the cost of insisting on its legal rights, unbearable for the population.

The resurgent Ethiopian threat of annexation makes the legacy of sanctions not a historical footnote but a current and critical vulnerability. While the formal UN sanctions are lifted, their structural damage is permanent, and a dense web of unilateral US sanctions, also supported by the European Union, under the Magnitsky Act and other mechanisms remains. The US Department of State's 2023 report continues to list Eritrea under severe restrictions, citing the very human rights conditions that the years of siege and sanctions created. Financial isolation continues; international banking channels, such as SWIFT platforms, remain shut and correspondent banking relationships that were severed during the years of UNSC sanctions have not been restored. This cripples not only state functions but the private sector's ability to engage in legitimate import/export, starving the economy of the very diversification needed to reduce dependence on national service for development projects. The renewed war talk, layered atop the existing stigma of a "sanctioned state," deters the long-term, large-scale investment in infrastructure and energy that could create alternative economic engines.

It is here that the work of the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the negative impact of unilateral coercive measures, Professor Alena Douhan, becomes indispensable. In her 2023 and 2024 reports, Douhan has documented what Eritrea experienced firsthand: measures imposed without Security Council authorisation, failing the criteria for lawful countermeasures, and violating multilateral treaty obligations. On the negative impact of unilateral coercive measures, she has also provided the analytical framework to understand what Eritrea had to face. Since her appointment in 2020, Douhan has developed a rigorous, evidence-based methodology to distinguish lawful sanctions (UNSC-authorised Chapter VII measures, retorsions, or proportionate countermeasures) from illegal unilateral coercive measures (UCMs) that violate the UN Charter's principles of sovereign equality and non-intervention and peaceful settlement of disputes [Douhan, UN Reports 2021-2024].

Professor Douhan also introduced the concept of "over-compliance"—where businesses and financial institutions, fearing secondary sanctions and penalties that can reach $billion in fines and twenty years imprisonment in the US, withdraw entirely from sanctioned countries rather than risk any exposure [Douhan, February 2026 Eritrea interview]. Douhan reports that even contractors refused to perform social media monitoring work for her own office—the UN Special Rapporteur's mandate—for fear of losing clients and penalty exposure [Douhan, technical presentation February 2026]. The so-called "humanitarian exceptions" for food and medicine, she documents, are largely performative: even when such goods are formally exempt, the surrounding ecosystem is disabled with no fertilizers, no seeds, no vaccines for livestock, no agricultural machinery, no energy infrastructure, no salary payments for public health workers [Douhan, February 2026 Eritrea interview].

In her February 2026 Guiding Principles on Sanctions, Business and Human Rights Capacity Building trip to Eritrea, Douhan elaborated on these mechanisms, drawing on case studies from Venezuela, Iran, Cuba, and Zimbabwe. The Venezuela HIV/AIDS case study she presents is instructive: before sanctions, the government covered 100% of tests and treatment; after sanctions, supply was blocked for two years; mortality doubled from 2,300 to 5,700 annually; UNICEF's partial delivery reduced mortality to 3,200, demonstrating direct causality [Douhan, technical presentation February 2026]. Fuel sanctions made bus tickets unaffordable relative to monthly salaries, blocking access to remaining clinics.

This is the forensic causality chain that UN mechanisms have consistently refused to apply to Eritrea, not because the data is unavailable, but because the mechanisms authorised to examine Eritrea (the Commission of Inquiry, the Special Rapporteur on Human Rights) operate on mandates that investigate alleged violations by the state, not violations committed against the state.

Crucially, Douhan has provided the vocabulary to describe what Eritrea faced. She explicitly mentions "over-compliance" defined as "self-imposed restraints that go beyond the restrictions mandated by sanctions, either as part of a de-risking process, or to minimise the potential for inadvertent violations or to avoid reputational or other business risks, or as a means to limit compliance costs". This is not atmosphere. This is structure.

Douhan documents that over-compliance is driven by rational fear: secondary sanctions targeting third-country entities, criminal penalties reaching five years' imprisonment in the EU and twenty years in the United States, and corporate fines as high as $9 billion (e.g. the penalty levied against BNP Paribas). Companies do not prioritise human rights; they prioritise risk minimisation and profit. When the penalty for miscalculation is existential, the rational response is total withdrawal. Douhan reports that even contractors refused to perform social media monitoring work for her own office, to carry out part of the UN Special Rapporteur's mandate, for fear of losing clients and penalty exposure. If the UN's own mandate holder cannot secure compliance, what chance does an Eritrean importer or the Commercial Bank of Eritrea have?

This brings us to the narrative battlefield, where the facts of the siege and the sanctions were laundered into a story of innate tyranny and scapegoating. A 2015 CNN report, for instance, would describe Eritrea as the “North Korea of Africa” without ever explaining the permanent mobilization required by the unresolved border conflict. Human Rights Watch reports meticulously catalogued abuses of conscription and referred to the Eritrean National Service as “slavery” but consistently buried the causative context of the EEBC stalemate. The 2016 UN Human Rights Council’s Commission of Inquiry (COI) on Eritrea declared, based on witness testimony gathered from 500 refugees (a sample with inherent bias), that “crimes against humanity” had been committed. It created a totalizing, ahistorical narrative of repression, systematically decoupling government policy from the reality of a country under a 20-year war-footing enforced from outside.

What this narrative systematically excluded is as damning as what it included. The widespread condemnation by Eritrean nationals that the Commission had "disregarded the testimonies of 42,000 Diaspora Eritreans living in over 20 countries who contested its well-known biases" and "ignored the request of 856 Eritreans who asked to appear in person in Geneva to present their testimonies after promising that it would give them a hearing." Reuters and other outlets reported that the COI received "almost 45,000 written submissions, almost all group letters and petitions criticising the first report" [Reuters, 2016]. The COI's response was to claim, without documentation or proof, that some signatories had been coerced or their signatures forged. The methodological asymmetry is stark: 500 refugee testimonies, identity unverified, context unexamined, cross-examination impossible, were treated as credible evidence of crimes against humanity. 45,000 counter-submissions were treated as a public relations problem to be explained away.

This narrative became the diplomatic and media script, weaponized to justify the very sanctions that had exacerbated the conditions being criticized. It created a closed loop: impose a siege, sanction the economic response to that siege, then cite the resulting militarization and poverty as evidence of criminal governance. It is a strategy of provocation and condemnation, designed to make genuine internal reform impossible by keeping the nation permanently off-balance, permanently in a defensive crouch. A sanitized narrative that obscures this causality to present the victim as the rogue by information war that has created a closed loop of a "distorted media and captured narrative".

Complex, context-dependent challenges are flattened into a disgraceful "regime change agenda" dressed in the language of human rights. This corrupts the entire dialogue. Genuine issues of governance and due process exist, as they do in all societies, but they become impossible to address constructively when any internal discussion is immediately instrumentalized by external actors whose end goal is subversion. How can a society possibly engage in a sober, internal dialogue needed to address genuine issues when the narrative battlefield turns genuine critique and renders them impossible by a flood of distortion in the captured media ecosystem, repeating a regime-change agenda in the language of human rights and when every internal challenge is weaponized by external actors. Lessons learnt from history are not subtle on this point. When the framework of engagement is demonization, the result is never the improvement of rights but their wholesale destruction in chaos. It is a demand for surrender, not a roadmap for reform. Therefore, the pressing human rights concerns cannot be divorced from this overarching reality of siege.

This analysis is not intended as a plea for sympathy but as an assessment of a process shaped by cumulative pressures. The documented human rights concerns are real; however, they developed within a national environment conditioned by prolonged insecurity following the non-implementation of the 2002 EEBC decision and the extended uncertainty over territorial integrity. This created an immense strain on Eritrea, but its primary source is an enforced and protracted state of insecurity, not policy in a vacuum.

The recent resurgence of Ethiopian territorial claims should be understood within the broader trajectory of the unresolved border dispute. It is the vindication of Eritrea’s core argument that the underlying threat was never resolved but was merely dormant, staying for over two decades in a state of “No Peace, No War.” This was a rational assessment of an unfinished war.

The brief peace following Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s de jure acceptance of the EEBC ruling in 2018, a move that led directly to the UN lifting its sanctions in November of that year has unraveled. With Ethiopia’s catastrophic internal war in Tigray (2020-2022), Eritrea was again drawn into a regional conflict, its involvement framed in the West not as a function of an unresolved border security nightmare but as proof of innate belligerence. This ignored the fact that the Tigray People's Liberation Front (TPLF), which controlled the Ethiopian state during the 1998 war and the subsequent occupation, remained the ruling party in a region bordering Eritrea and which still housed military assets on sovereign Eritrean territory.

Imperial Ethiopian ambitions resurging the old rhetoric has returned with stark clarity even though the TPLF is militarily diminished now. In October 2023, Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed addressed the Ethiopian parliament and asserted that Ethiopia has a "natural, legal, historical, and demographic right to own an outlet to the Red Sea," and insisting on regaining Ethiopia's "historical place" either "peacefully or by other means”. Subsequently, the Ethiopian government’s Security Council officially designated Eritrea, alongside the TPLF, as a "national security threat." High-ranking Ethiopian officials and state-affiliated media openly discuss reclaiming "port control on the Red Sea," through all means possible, including through forceful "alternative means", a clear euphemism for annexation of Eritrean sovereign land (specifically the coast around Assab).

This is state policy articulated in speeches and strategic documents. As African Arguments documented in December 2023, Ethiopian state media outlets and a "motley of state-affiliated social media activists" are whipping up an aggressive campaign mainly aimed at Eritrea, in contravention of the UN Charter's prohibition on threats or use of force against the sovereignty and territorial integrity of another state. The drums of war are not merely being beaten; a formal declaration of war is being constructed in real time.

The other central pillar of external critique is the “Indefinite National Service” under forced mobilisation. This cannot be divorced from the foundational crisis of sovereignty imposed upon Eritrea. The 1998-2000 “Eritrea-Ethiopia border war” and its aftermath are not historical footnotes. They are the defining geopolitical reality and an indefinite service policy as a national security imperative to defend itself against perpetual state of militarized alert, especially by Ethiopia. To frame this purely as a domestic policy choice, without acknowledging it as a forced adaptation to an unaddressed act of aggression, is intellectually dishonest. The current Ethiopian rhetoric validates every strategic decision made since 2002 by Eritrea. The call for demobilization and a shift away from a garrison state becomes impossible to entertain when the existential threat is actively renewing its manifesto. The sanctions' legacy ensures the economy cannot quickly pivot to absorb demobilized youth, and the renewed territorial threats make the security apparatus feel more essential than ever. Thus, the vicious cycle is made visible by the contemporary situation in which the original sin is repeating itself.

The failure to enforce the EEBC ruling created a reality where ‘might makes right’. Ethiopia learned that territorial conquest via occupation and subsequent rejection of international law carries no consequence. Having internalized that lesson, it now feels emboldened to openly articulate further annexationist goals.

Engineered economic stagnation (sanctions targeting development capacity) is telling of Eritrea's post-independence economic trajectory. Following a period of initial growth and reconstruction, the 1998 “border war” devastated progress. Just as recovery might have begun, a regime of comprehensive international sanctions was imposed in 2009, based on allegations that were proven untenable to a deaf ear of UNSC. These sanctions cast a long shadow over the economic recovery potential of the country as they were followed by UCM by the US/EU and others.

The sanction’s most damaging impact is also on optics. Investment is a function of perceived risk and stability. The sanction regime legally and politically stigmatized the country, deterring foreign capital and constraining financial transactions (primarily by shutting Eritrea out of the SWIFT system and blocking its alternative financial organs from operating). It functioned as a deliberate brake on "Eritrean self-reliance and development." The sanctions were not a neutral instrument of governance; they were a tool of economic coercion, amplifying the hardships of a population already bearing the burden of a militarized frontier.

The UN Special Rapporteur on unilateral coercive measures has developed a 157-indicator monitoring tool to monitor the human rights impacts of unilateral sanctions—direct and indirect, economic and humanitarian [Douhan, technical presentation February 2026]. The tool has been applied in Venezuela, Iran, Cuba, and Zimbabwe. It has never been applied to Eritrea. This is not because the data is unavailable, but it is because the mechanisms authorised to examine Eritrea operate on mandates that investigate alleged violations by the state, not violations committed against the state. The contrast between UN mechanisms could not be starker.

In February 2026, Professor Alena Douhan undertook a technical capacity-building visit to Asmara. She conducted a workshop with line ministries, met with high-level government officials, youth and women representatives as well as gave a public interview to Eri-TV and Eritrea Profile explaining her mandate, the illegality of UCMs, and the mechanics of over-compliance [Shabait, February 2026]. During her visit to Eritrea, she did not conduct a formal and thorough investigation or issue a report on Eritrea because the mandate of her trip to Eritrea was limited to a technical cooperation mission with elements of making a preliminary contact with the country and building capacity to bring awareness of what such mandate entails.

However, the contrast with the 2016 Commission of Inquiry is not subtle. The COI came to convict. Douhan came to build capacity. One UN mechanism weaponised testimony. Another UN mechanism offers technical cooperation. One was refused engagement; the other was welcomed. The pattern is not Eritrea's resistance to scrutiny. It is Eritrea's resistance to weaponised scrutiny and openness to cooperative scrutiny.

It is obvious that Douhan's mandate has been systematically obstructed by the very UN system that resources other investigative mechanisms on Eritrea. Her 157-indicator monitoring tool that was developed through extensive consultation to measure direct and indirect impact of sanctions remains largely unused in the field. It is known to this author that UN IT departments were hesitant to support the tool; UN headquarters discouraged Resident Coordinators and UN Country Teams from using it; the World Health Organisation developed an internal tool but refuses to make it public. Procurement delays and contractor fear block engagement with affected markets. The mandate holder charged with documenting the human rights impact of sanctions on countries like Eritrea operates with minimal staffing (her office is composed of herself, one staff member from Office of the High Commission for Human Rights (OHCHR), and a few consultants) while the other mechanisms that investigate Eritrea are fully resourced, fully promoted, and fully integrated into the human rights apparatus. This is not a system that seeks truth. It is a system that selects which truths to resource.

To address the human rights issue and the unravelling of the impact of both the UNSC and the Unilateral Coercive Measures (UCM) without first dismantling this architecture is to demand a patient under sustained, violent assault to first perfect his posture before stopping the blows. History is clear, when the framework of engagement is predicated on demonization and the goal is destabilization, the result is never an improvement in human welfare. It is chaos, violence, and deeper erosion of rights.

The remedy is sequential and need not be negotiable:

1. Full and officially declared respect for the EEBC border delimitation and demarcation between Eritrea and Ethiopia, and the cessation of all annexation and other related ambitions and threats by Ethiopia. The international community must, twenty-four years after the original betrayal, finally enforce the treaty it guaranteed. Until Ethiopia's territorial ambitions are unequivocally quashed by its international partners, and until the hardened state policy of Eritrea and all its unfortunate consequences remains an unwanted choice stability and regional peace cannot be attained in the area. For Eritrea, staying firm where it stands is the only rational response to an unfinished war and global injustice.
2. The unconditional lifting of all remaining unilateral coercive measures and sanction designations against and on Eritrea, including residual Magnitsky designations and the web of financial isolation that persists despite the formal lifting of UNSC sanctions. Meanwhile, the sanctions regime, past and present, ensures Eritrea remains economically hamstrung, unable to build a peace dividend, and forced to maintain the very structures of mobilization that its critics decry. The "distorted media narrative" then reports on the mobilization and the poverty as causes, rather than effects, completing a perfect cycle of provocation and condemnation. The very forces that cry loudest about human rights in Eritrea are, through their support for a lawless international order and the maintenance of economic warfare, directly contributing to the conditions that make the improvement of those rights impossible. Until Ethiopia's territorial ambitions are unequivocally quashed by its international partners, and until the last vestiges of sanction-led financial strangulation are lifted, the hardened state policy of Eritrea and all its unfortunate consequences is not a choice. It is the only rational response to an unfinished war and global injustice.
3. Shift the deliberate and destructive narrative on Eritrea to that of cooperation and partnership agenda by building bridges and peace to enable the country rise from the impact of unnecessary sanctions. A changed information and media targeting from subversion to constructive scrutiny could help ease the pressure on Eritreans by adopting the framework of the Special Rapporteur on unilateral coercive measures as the legitimate mechanism for international engagement with Eritrea on sanctions-related issues.
4. The application of the UN Special Rapporteur on UCMs' 157-indicator monitoring tool to Eritrea, to establish, once and for all, the direct and indirect causality between unilateral coercive measures and the human rights outcomes that have been attributed solely to domestic policy. If the tool is fit for Zimbabwe in Africa, it is fit for Eritrea. Its non-application is not a methodological gap; it is a missed opportunity by Eritrea. The concerns regarding human rights and civic space are not dismissed; they are reframed within a struggle for existential survival. Eritrea has been engaged in a continuous, multi-generational fight for sovereignty: first against colonial rule - then against annexation - and now against a more sophisticated campaign of isolation, financial strangulation, and narrative capture. The inquiry must be mutual. To speak of due process while ignoring the active process of undermining the state's very foundation is hypocrisy. We must distinguish between those who genuinely "care about the country's development" and those leveraging human rights as a Trojan horse for agendas that have, for decades, sought to compromise Eritrea's hard-fought sovereignty.
5. Eritrean citizens, civic associations, business owners, legal and academic fraternity as well as the diaspora Eritrean should come together to establish an anti-UCM movement to challenge its very application to defend the wellbeing of the population and businesses in Eritrea that are severely affected. This must be a civic movement against sanctions growing organically from the bottom up, not from any central coordination (the optic is important). It should begin with diaspora professionals: lawyers, academics, business owners in several parts of Africa and the northern hemisphere. This community could be built for this particular purpose by initiating a wide dialogue by starting informal discussion on how sanctions are affecting their lives and work. These conversations must lead to practical collaboration:

• lawyers offering pro bono advice on navigating the regulations of the Office of Foreign Assets (OFAC) - a body of the US Department of Treasury that administers and enforces economic and trade sanctions against targeted foreign countries, regimes, individuals, and entities as well as the unilateral sanctions on Eritrea.
• academics documenting the economic damage to ordinary households,
• business owners sharing strategies for keeping trade alive despite banking restrictions.
• these discussions among the diaspora networks must link with back home through family and professional ties, bringing in local business associations, university researchers, and community leaders who will help to collect testimonies from ordinary citizens whose livelihoods had been destroyed not by politics but by the simple inability to receive remittances, access medicines, or export goods.
• This will make the civic movement hold without depending on external funding or partisan politics. It must be built on existing relationships, on shared experience, on people recognizing that their individual struggles were collective, and on the quiet, persistent work of documenting, sharing, and supporting each other.
• This will also open Eritreans to learning from other similar movements in Africa, notably that of Zimbabwe.
• It is imperative that Eritrea hosts an initiation event in Asmara to set the direction, goals and expected outcomes of such a civic movement in support of the nation. The silence by the people shouldn’t be the way forward. It must be turned into a well organised and meaningful engagement to rid the nation of all sorts of illegal sanctions imposed on it.

This will no doubt add massive impetus to fight against illegal sanctions on Eritrea without having to wait for the formal channels.

Only on that foundation of mutual respect and historical clarity can a dialogue on integrated progress, security, development, and rights truly begin. Only then does the space for a sovereign, internal dialogue on governance, free from the distorting pressure of existential threats as well as the healing of its economic viability could truly begin when it is done through a sober, context-rich partnership that respects the principle of self-determination. To engage earnestly on human rights requires first dismantling the architecture of threat that has made repackaging a national imperative. It requires honouring past legal commitments (the EEBC ruling), ending residual forms of economic warfare, and abandoning information campaigns designed to instigate unrest rather than foster reform.

The path forward is not applying external demands through "playing into" or the one-size-fits-all application of a modelled "democracy". A young and new nation must be left to exercise its own growth and focus on its internal dynamics, so it acquires an organic nation building mechanism that is both contextually and rationally applicable to its own reality. It is through a sober, context-rich partnership that respects the principle of self-determination that meaningful support by partners could be provided seamlessly.

The sequence is now visible in its entirety. Impose a siege. Sanction the response to the siege. Then cite the resulting militarisation and poverty as evidence of criminal governance. My analogy to this is – “push him down to the ground - make him break the glass he is holding in his hand – and then turn around and blame him for not holding the glass more carefully”.

The world has spent two decades asking Eritrea to fix its spine while refusing to remove the boot from its neck. The first step is to remove the boot.

The rest is a conversation for Eritreans, finally in peace!