Informant for brutal Ethiopian regime wins another chance to stay in Canada

This former emperor's palace in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, once served as a torture site under the communist Derg regime. Photo by MICHAEL TEWELDE /AFP via Getty Images

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A former informant for a Marxist-Leninist military junta that ruled Ethiopia for 17 years, and who acknowledged that people he reported on were arrested and imprisoned, with some of them subjected to interrogations, beatings, and torture, has won another chance at staying in Canada.

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Mesresha Zewide, an Ethiopian citizen who came here 22 years ago as a refugee, was in the process of applying for permanent residency when immigration officials found in April 2017 that his involvement with Ethiopia’s Derg regime made him inadmissible to Canada for crimes against humanity, and ordered his deportation.

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“In June 1989, when he was 17 years of age, (Zewide) was forcibly recruited to work for a local kebele in Addis Ababa. Kelebes were neighbourhood associations established by the governing Derg regime to monitor the political opposition, among other functions,” Justice John Norris wrote in a recent Federal Court decision out of Toronto.

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For nearly two years, Zewide “gathered information and informed on individuals suspected of being members of the opposition, including the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) and the Ethiopian People’s Liberation Front (EPLF),” said the judge’s July 22 decision.

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“People on whom he reported were arrested and imprisoned,” said the decision, noting “some of them would have been subjected to interrogations, beatings, and torture. Such abuses were endemic during the decades the Derg regime was in power.”

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Zewide was granted refugee protection in Canada in June 2008 “on the basis of his well-founded fear of persecution at the hands of the EPRDF government.” In May 1991, it overthrew the Derg, the brutal regime for which Zewide worked as an informant, ending the Ethiopian Civil War.

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Because of his work for the Derg, Zewide was arrested and detained in Ethiopia. He spent a month in detention before escaping and making his way to Canada.

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After he was found inadmissible here, Zewide applied for an exemption on humanitarian and compassionate grounds “on the basis of the unblemished, pro-social life he has lived in Canada since coming here in 2004; his establishment in Canada; the best interests of his daughter (who was born in the United States in 2003 and who continues to live there with her mother); the restrictions he faces when he wishes to travel; and the impact of his provisional status as a Convention refugee on his mental health and overall well being,” said the decision.

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Zewide, now 54, “placed particular emphasis on the fact that the events in question happened long ago when, at a young age, he was forcibly conscripted to assist the Derg regime,” said the decision. “He contended that the life he has lived since then, which included political activism in support of human rights in Ethiopia, demonstrated that his past acts do not reflect his true character.”