on Migrant Workers and their Families (CMW) The CRM heard that government had not ratified optional protocols especially those that empower individuals to complain about the government in the international forum. XVI. The Ethiopian Constitution contains the international-law friendly provision which stipulates that all ratified international conventions can be invoked and applied in the Ethiopian Courts without any necessary Legislative Act domesticating these treaties. Though Ethiopia law is friendly to international law, Ethiopia has not fully implemented those conventions it has already ratified. Ethiopia is behind in its reporting obligations on major international human rights treaties. For instance, Ethiopia made its first reporting on the Convention against Torture, International Convention on Civil and Political Rights and the International Convention on Economic, Social and Cultural rights on 28/07/20092 since it ratified these conventions. XVII. Ethiopia has conducted regular and competitive elections as follows: Constituent Assembly elections in 1994; general elections into the country’s first popularlyelected national parliament and regional councils or legislatures, in May and June 1995; the first multiparty elections in 2000; and another set of multi-party elections in May 2005. Voter turn-out has increased with each set of elections, reaching a record 90 percent of registered voters in the 2005 elections. Ethiopia held its fourth parliamentary elections on 23 May 2010, where the ruling EPRDF party won 499 of the 536 seats in parliament. According to the election results released by National Election Board of Ethiopia (NEBE) on 21 June 2010, the EPRDF won a landslide victory in 9 of the 11 regions and cities, where 93 percent of eligible voters participated in the election. African Union (AU) election observers reported that the election was completely “free and fair” and met all AU election standards. Though the opposition parties rejected the election results as being “completely fraudulent” and expressed pre-election intimidation, the AU observer team found no evidence to support the opposition’s charges of pre-election intimidation. XVIII. A number of major challenges, however, must be tackled. First, political asymmetries between the regional states and the consequential regional inequalities must be constructively approached. In the same way, applying the policy of equity to redress historic disadvantages of some national and ethnic groups, particularly in education and in the public service, must be reconciled with the merit principle. A related problem has to do with the top-down nature of governance processes, which apparently is due to the application of the governing principle of democratic centralism as adopted by the ruling party. The 2 http://www.unhchr.ch - 26 -