47. The objectives of the SPO were: (a) to prosecute the officials of the Derg regime responsible for killing thousands of students, the intelligentsia, and urban elites; and (b) to establish a permanent record of the atrocities by compiling all the written evidence and soliciting literally hundreds of oral testimonies from victims and their families. The range of procedures and various levels of trials prosecuted in different courts throughout the country are collectively known as the Red Terror Trials. 48. After its establishment in 1992, the SPO began immediately investigations and submitted initial charges in October 1994, marking the beginning of the Red Terror trials. At the outset, the trials were welcomed by large segments of the Ethiopian population and the international community. A number of governments did provide support to the SPO and its activities, responding to a twelve-month request circulated in July 1993 for assistance in the three areas of computerisation, infrastructure, and international technical assistance, in the amount of just under one million US dollars. This was sought to supplement an annual Ethiopian government budget subsidy to the SPO of approximately a third of a million US dollars. 49. The SPO laid charges against three groups of alleged perpetrators in the Red Terror trials. In the first group of defendants were policymakers, senior government and military officials of the Derg regime. Special Prosecutor v. Colonel Mengistu Hailemarian et al. is the prosecution of the first group of defendants: an initial list of 106 high-ranking Derg government officials, including Colonel Mengisitu Hailemariam (former President). 50. The trial of the first category of ‘high officials’ opened in December 1994, with 46 defendants, and a further 24 individuals - including former President Col. Mengistu Hailemariam - charged ‘in absentia’. A first series of SPO charges were laid against 5,198 military and public officials of the Derg regime. Charges against some 2,258 defendants were handed down by regional supreme courts by delegation from the federal high court. Accordingly, 202 defendants were charged in the Tigray region, 508 defendants in the Amhara region, 421 defendants in the Southern Nations, Nationalities and Peoples region, 198 defendants in the Harari region, and 174 defendants in the Somali region. An unidentified number of defendants were also brought before the Oromia Supreme Court. All the Red Terror cases in the regional Supreme courts began in 1998 in the capital city of each region. 51. Trial proceedings were not without problems. There were several challenges, including protracted delays. After more than a decade, with many defendants still under trial, little of the wider potential of this set of opportunities seems to have been fulfilled. Problems of capacity within the judiciary, combined with inadequate political management of investigation and prosecution processes, resulted in an exceptionally slow timetable for laying the charges and proceeding to the trial of defendants. - 53 -