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214 Diagnosing Corruption in Ethiopia
The Criminal Justice Chain
In table 5.4 (extracted from table 5.1), the areas of most concern are
bolded. Lack of bolding indicates that a problem was not mentioned and
thus is either nonexistent or not significant. It should be stressed that
even the bolded items were not deemed as highly common but simply as
areas where corruption sometimes occurs.
Again, the bolded items suggest that what corruption occurs in the
criminal justice system is relatively limited regarding where and how it
operates. Current wisdom holds that the sense of insecurity among sector
personnel gives rise to two forms of corruption in criminal cases:
• Willingness to make decisions in politically sensitive cases in accord
with the perceived wishes or actual instructions of political actors
• Greater vulnerability to bribes because one never knows how long one
will hold his or her current position.
Police. Except for the traffic police, whose tendency to shake down drivers
for imagined faults or offer to ignore real ones is pervasive (if still not at the
levels seen in much of the region), neither type of action is seen as frequent,
but they do occur. The ethics and anticorruption commissions receive
numerous complaints about police in this regard and, as opposed to complaints
against judges and prosecutors, seem to have some success in investigating
them, either directly or by delegation to the respective police
forces. Among the most common complaints involving police are these:
• Bribe taking by traffic police
• Abuse of power or excessive use of force—not always corruption,
although in some cases it may involve threats of false arrest or falsification
of evidence
• Taking of bribes to alter evidence
• Taking of bribes to harass witnesses, or in the case of legal actions
against police, doing it to help out a colleague
• Theft of evidence when it has some value
• Taking of bribes to not make or to delay an arrest—it was mentioned
that some suspects ask to delay the arrest until a Monday, thus avoiding
a weekend in jail and avoiding jail entirely by paying bail
• Taking of bribes to (a) not find the defendant so that he or she does
not appear for the charging hearing, or (b) not bring witnesses for the
prosecution.