Match. Cameroon's Choupo-Moting scores winner as Bayern reclaim Bundesliga top.. English Premier League results & fixtures (26th matchday), Germany Bundesliga results & fixtures (23rd matchday), Israeli delegation expelled from the African Union summit. Turning then to Ethiopia. L'Europe en Formation, 365(3), 99-138. l Coordinates 111255N 3505 . Zegabi East Africa News (2015). However, an agreement was still far from reach. An agreement between Ethiopia, Egypt and Sudan on the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam is within reach, with the United Nations standing ready to support talks and the African Union-led process to settle remaining differences, the Under-Secretary-General for Political and Peacebuilding Affairs told the Security Council in a 29 June videoconference meeting*. Since plans for Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) were first announced in 2011, Cairo has viewed the project as a serious threat to the country's water supply. It also created a counter message to Egypts powerful the Nile is Egypt narrative that is familiar around the world. The Nile-COM is the highest political and decisionmaking body of the NBI. The Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam. Egypt says. Egypt wants control and guarantees for its share of Nile waters. In recognition of the fact that the Nile Waters Treaties had become an uncomfortable and anachronistic vestige of colonialism, ten watercourse states along the Nile (including Egypt and Ethiopia) agreed in 1999 to form the Nile Basin Initiative (NBI). Another argument Egypt might adduce concerns the DoP. This exception was implemented to mitigate the risk of decolonisation leading to boundary wars. The filling regime and operational methods of GERD will affect Egypt, in particular through its impact on the operation of its Aswan High Dam (AHD) which aims at mitigating the high variability of the Nile River flow. The official narrative is that Ethiopia can uproot poverty and bring about a definitive end to social and economic underdevelopment by means of the construction of a series of mega-dams combined with the development of the national energy infrastructure. Water scarcity is a growing problem. Feb 11th 2021 DAMS HAVE several uses. One senior advisor to former Ethiopian prime minister Meles Zenawi alluded to it when he said that Ethiopia will supply the electricity, Sudan the food, and Egypt the money. To which we might add, and South Sudan will supply the oil.. Egypts main argument might be that, despite being unsatisfactory and anachronistic, the Nile Waters Treaties remain good law and are enforceable against the respective parties. The Tendaho, Tekeze, and the Gibe series are only a few examples from that period. After all, the VCLT allows states to withdraw from or terminate a treaty owing to a fundamental change of circumstances which has occurred and which was not foreseen by the parties (Article 62(1)). Thus, as with the Watercourses Convention and the CFA, the DoP does not offer a clear legal resolution to the dispute. However, another trend stresses the need to approach the question from a broader and more holistic perspective. The Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam located in the Benishangul-Gumuz Region of Ethiopia, about 45 km east of the border with Sudan. The so-called Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (Gerd) is Africa's biggest hydroelectric project to date. IDS (2013). Improved relations among Egyptians, Ethiopians, and Sudanese can go a long way in enhancing the ability of their leaders to negotiate and adopt agreements that reflect the interests of citizens, especially regarding economic development and poverty alleviation. It's free to sign up and bid on jobs. The 10-year filling time of GERD will likely contribute to fastened salinisation in Egypt. 74 cubic metres. The significance of Gulf involvement was highlighted by the . The crucial leverage regarding Egypts water security lies with the Blue Nile countries Ethiopia and Sudan, as the Blue Nile is the main contributor to the Nile Rivers flow downstream. A Tripartite National Committee (TNC), consisting of national experts from Egypt, Ethiopia and Sudan, was constituted in order to determine principles of cooperation. In June 2020, tensions escalated when Ethiopia declared its intent to fill the dam in July without an agreement, which again led to Egypt and Sudan requesting UNSC intervention on the matter (Kandeel, 2020). It is clearly a philosophy that looks beyond the electricity and freshwater needs of local communities to a geo-strategic restructuring of the Horn of Africa. However, for the reasons given above, the Nile Waters Treaties are unlikely to be considered territorial treaties. Gebreluel, G. (2014). Still, Egypt may be playing with fire if it were to press the legal significance of the DoP. For a decade, Egypt and Ethiopia have been at a diplomatic stalemate over the Nile's management. Both Egypt and Ethiopia could make arguments in support of their positions. For Ethiopia, GERD is considered an economic game-changer. The Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) is a critical project that intends to provide hydroelectricity to support the livelihoods of millions of people in the region. The three countries have agreed that when the flow of Nile water to the dam falls below 35-40 b.c.m. We do know that Ethiopia is already seeing longer droughts and worse floods. With regard to the mega-dams, the Gilgel Gibe III Dam and the GERD speak volumes on the substance of Zenawis political ideology. (eds.). The Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) is a 6,450 MW hydropower project nearing completion on the Blue Nile in Ethiopia, located about 30 km upstream of the border with Sudan. Therefore, all the water is eventually released downstream with the effect that there is no net loss of water to downstream states. While this means new opportunities to develop extended irrigation-based agriculture for the Sudanese, it represents also a new threat for Egypts current Nile water utilisation (Whittington et al., 2014). For example, in 2017, the UNSC highlighted the security risks of water stress in the Lake Chad Basin Region, affecting Cameroon, Chad, Niger, and Nigeria, based on a combination of water scarcity, drought, desertification and land degradation. It is perhaps the most glaring demonstration of environmental or climate injustice that the youngest continent (60 percent of the population is below the age of twenty-five) is also the one that has historically least contributed to the industrial emissions of greenhouse gases yet is likely the one that will be hardest affected by meteorological Also, the Sudanese Foreign Ministry later held the Egyptian side accountable for failure of these negotiations. Egypt's 100 million people rely on the Nile for 90% of the country's water needs. Could the Nile dispute be an opportunity to boost freshwater technology? According to Article 16, former colonies do not inherit the treaty obligations of their former colonial rulers and instead receive a clean slate. However, Egypt could argue that the territorial treaty exception, under Articles 11 and 12, applies whereby colonial treaty provisions concerning boundaries must survive the impact of succession and bind successor states. Ethiopia, however, prefers to have the flexibility to make decisions on how to deal with droughts. Thus, it is only through cooperation that Egypt, Ethiopia, Sudan, and the other riparians can peacefully resolve conflicts over the Nile and achieve the type of water use that will contribute significantly to regional economic and human development. Given the importance of water to Ethiopian agriculture, it resulted in the tragic irony that, as Thurow put it, the land than feeds the Nile is unable to feed itself. The status quo started to change when Ethiopia began construction of the Dam, just east of its border with Sudan, in 2011. Copyright 2023, JURIST Legal News & Research Services, Inc. Elliot Winter | New Castle University (UK), Egyptian Water Security and the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam: Why Ethiopia has the Upper Hand, Vienna Convention on the Succession of States, history of copyright in the United States. These parallel developments appear to be elements of a bigger hydro-political strategy wherein the riparian countries aim to increase their water utilisation to put facts on the ground (and underpin legal claims based on those uses) and increase their bargaining position for renegotiations of volumetric water allocations. The various warnings by experts about the dangers of the new Ethiopian dam have begun to cause panic among Egyptians, to the point of belief that the Aswan Dam will collapse once the Renaissance is completed. Ethiopia and Sudan are currently developing and implementing water infrastructure developments unilaterally - as Egypt has done in the past and continues to do. Ethiopian general threatens military force to defend Nile dam as negotiations with Egypt falter. Poverty alleviation, which is a major concern for all Nile Basin countries, could form the basis of a cooperative arrangement between all the Niles riparians. However, this threatens the basin's long-term sustainability (as water use expands beyond what is environmentally feasible) and suboptimal in terms of capital allocation (as higher water use upstream may make downstream projects uneconomical (Swain, 2011). Rendering of GERDEthiopia is building one of the largest dams in the world, the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD), on the River Nile near the Sudan border. Second, regarding the 1902 Anglo-Ethiopian Treaty, although Ethiopia was a party and although that instrument does deal with the flow of water on the Nile, its terms are strictly limited. (2012). Ethiopias interests in developing its water resources are driven by its growing population and high demand for socio-economic development (Gebreluel, 2014). In its 2013 report, the International Rivers Organisation predicted that the long-term effects of the Gibe III Dam would turn Lake Turkana into another Aral Sea. Addis Ababa has said the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD), a $4bn hydropower project, is crucial to its economic development and to provide power. This has now changed due to political consolidation over the past two decades and the advent of alternative sources of external finance (to the traditional multilateral development banks), not least from China (Gebreluel, 2014;IDS, 2013). The politicisation of the Niles water and the utilisation of development projects to achieve political ends are not new phenomena. In March 2015, a 'Declaration of Principles' was signed by the leaders of Egypt, Sudan and Ethiopia, setting the foundations for an initial cooperation (Salman, 2017). A political requirement will be to agree on rules for filling the GERD reservoir and on operating rules for the GERD, especially during periods of drought. You must have JavaScript enabled to use this form. Test. But with a generation capacity of 6.45GW, the Ethiopian government quoted the project as vital to the country's economic growth. Finally, Ethiopia could make a strong case that the operation of the Dam is in alignment with the core principles of international water law, namely equitable utilisation and no significant harm. These are found in Articles 5 and 7 of the Water Courses Convention respectively and, despite the scepticism outlined above, arguably form part of customary international law. The dispute over the GERD is part of a long-standing feud between Egypt and Sudanthe downstream stateson the one hand, and Ethiopia and the upstream riparians on the other over access to the Niles waters, which are considered a lifeline for millions of people living in Egypt and Sudan. But the Ethiopian elites show little interest in addressing such concerns, bent as they are on a nationalist revivalist project that claims an Ethiopian exceptionalism that places Addis Ababa above international law as it pursues a water-management strategy that has less to do with its development aims than with its ambitions to weaponise water in a bid for regional hegemony. Cairo Controversy prevailed in the Egyptian public opinion, after Deltares, a Dutch advisory institute, announced on Sept. 15 its withdrawal from a study to assess the risks that the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, which is under construction on the Blue Nile, can cause to Egypt and Sudan. The 1959 agreement allocated all the Nile Rivers waters to Egypt and Sudan, leaving 10 billion cubic meters (b.c.m.) Whittington, D. et al. This crisis has raised great concerns among large sectors of the Egyptian society, especially in light of recalling such statements as "water war," "water militarization," "military management of the GERD crisis," "water terrorism," and "Ethiopian hydro-hegemony over the Nile Basin" [ 1, 2 ]. Ethiopia's determination to build a major new dam, the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD), for hydropower purposes has been the flashpoint of current conflicts in the Eastern Nile Basin (Gebreluel, 2014). These conflicts could take the form of international armed conflicts (between states), non-international armed conflicts between a group and a state, or conflicts between non-state groups. (2017). Ethiopia has never 'consumed' significant shares of the Niles water so far, as its previous political and economic fragility in combination with a lack of external financial support, due to persistent Egyptian opposition to projects upstream, prevented it from implementing large-scale projects. Sudans agricultural and hydropower interests align with those of Ethiopia while it has a strong interest in not alienating its 'big brother' and northern neighbour, Egypt, with whom it shares a long and partly contested border (Whittington et al., 2014). Construction of the 6,000-megawatt, US $5 billion Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) began . Ethiopias dam-construction strategy threatens not only Kenyas water-resource development efforts but also Somalias water security, as is evidenced by Ethiopias development plans for the Jubba and Shebelle Rivers. The toll on the local communities affected by the dams has been enormous. Construction on the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam began in 2011 and it is currently nearing completion. Furthermore, resolving conflicts involving the Nile River is most likely to be more successful through improvements in relations between the riparians and not through external intervention. This is because the VCLT allows an older treaty to be rescinded by a new one if the new one concerns the same topic (Article 59). What are the disadvantages of the Aswan Dam? The countrys 2003 development plan introduced many more, and the Ethiopian government launched an ambitious PR campaign to encourage donor nations and international funding agencies to support these projects financially and ideologically as the highway to Ethiopian development and prosperity. As a result, the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) has recognised water security as a possible threat to international peace. On 5 July 2021, Ethiopia informed Egypt and Sudan that the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) on the Blue Nile in Ethiopia is undergoing its second filling. It and several other large dams in Ethiopia could turn the country into Africa's hydropower hub. Test. Nevertheless, Egypt must not use sympathy for its water vulnerability as a weapon to frustrate the efforts of the other riparians to secure an agreement that is balanced, fair, and equitable. A political requirement will be to agree on rules for filling the GERD reservoir and on operating rules for the GERD, especially during periods of drought. Therefore, a negotiated position that favours Ethiopia is likely to be reached once it becomes politically palatable enough inside Egypt. Hydrological Sciences Journal, 56(4), 687-702. The New Arab (2020b). Consequently, it suits Egypts interests in this context to argue that the DoP is binding, that it precludes any net loss of flow and therefore that the use of the Dam for irrigation purposes is prohibited. (2017). This dam, set to be the largest in Africa in terms of power capacity, continues to cause disagreement between Ethiopia, Sudan and Egypt on filling and operation strategies. As mentioned above, Ethiopias dam-construction strategy is intimately linked with large-scale foreign investment in the agrarian sector and specifically in areas near the artificial reservoirs created by the dams. However, Ethiopia ultimately refused to sign the draft agreement. Here, for the first time, Egypt recognised Ethiopias right to use the Nile for development purposes. The Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, a 1.1-mile-long concrete colossus, is set to become the largest hydropower plant in Africa. The Blue Nile is Ethiopias largest river, with high potential for hydropower and irrigation. Moreover, with GERD, Ethiopia opts for a hydropower expansion strategy on the Blue Nile, and not an irrigation strategy. The first filling of the dam in July 2020 went uneventfully. The late Prime Minister Meles Zenawi, who laid the foundation stone in 2011, said the dam would be built without begging for money . The IPoE report recommended two studies to assess the environmental and socio-economic impacts of GERD and was interpreted by both the Egyptian and the Ethiopian government as a vindication of their respective positions. Maguid, M.A. The Kenyan Lake is heavily dependent on the fresh water and vital nutrients supplied by the rivers annual floods, making it a paradise for fisheries. It could be a treaty or merely a political declaration as the name implies. Trilateral talks between Egypt, Ethiopia and Sudan to finalise an agreement on a cooperation framework for the GERD have been mediated by the African Union, World Bank and United States. Since 2015, technical reports on the potential impacts of the dam have failed to reach a consensus within the TNC (Maguid, 2017). Another important area of cooperation is research, especially in areas like climate change, the fight against terrorism and extremism, and human rights. It can help the riparian states outline principles, rights, and obligations for cooperative management of the resources of the Nile. The Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) is a 6000 MW hydropower project on the Blue Nile, which the Ethiopian government plans to build to fulfill the country's energy needs. Ethiopian opinion is divided over the need for such huge investments in hydroelectric energy when the national network is still very underdeveloped and unable to cope. By Ambassador Gurjit Singh*. The strategy and its surrounding narrative have attracted large influxes of foreign investment in the Ethiopian agrarian sector, with multi-million dollar leases of agricultural land to foreigners generally linked to irrigation projects planned in tandem with the construction of the dam. Since its inception, there have been two, highly contentious, products. European countries including Italy, Belgium and especially the UK controlled the Nile as part of colonisation and the broader Scramble for Africa. These colonising states used the tactic of concluding treaties (often at gunpoint) to secure their interests and, in this case, essentially prohibit upstream states from using their own waters. Another difficulty for Egypt is that making this argument (i.e. Egypt had asked the UNSC to push the three countries to adhere to their obligations in accordance with the rules of international law in order to reach a fair and balanced solution to the issue of the GERD. Egypts repeated references to the rules of international law is part of an effort to maintain its so-called natural and historical rights that were established and reaffirmed by the 1929 Anglo-Egyptian Treaty and 1959 Agreement between Egypt and Sudan, respectivelytreaties many of the other involved parties reject as anachronistic and untenable. On March 4, 1834, the town of York in the British colony of Canada was incorporated as the City of Toronto. Another impressive snippet of information is that the Government of Ethiopia is financing the entire project, along with loans mainly from China. It simultaneously expects that this role will change Ethiopias international status from a country perceived as poor and dependent on foreign aid to a regional power able to provide vital resources to its surrounding region. The CFA was a political success for the eight upstream states such as Ethiopia as it favoured those states and isolated the downstream states of Egypt and Sudan and made them appear recalcitrant. 2. In terms of putative new law, namely the Watercourses Convention and the DoP, the key principles of equitable utilisation and no significant harm seem to leave ample room to accommodate the construction of a dam for hydroelectric generation purposes. An Ethiopian national flag is seen at the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam in Guba, Ethiopia, on February 19, 2022. . It merely provides at Article III that Ethiopia undertakes not to construct any work across the Blue Nile, Lake Tsana, or the Sobat which would arrest the flow of their waters into the Nile. In other words, Ethiopia only agreed that it would not completely stop the flow of tributaries into the Nile. Review a brief history of copyright in the United States. Similarly, in 2018, the UNSC noted the water security risks in African nations such as Somalia, Sudan and Mali. [35] The lack of international financing for projects on the Blue Nile River has persistently been attributed to Egypt's campaign to keep control on the Nile water share. Ethiopia, with a population of more than 115 million people and Projected to be 230 million by 2050. The current global energy crisis may help in this regard in the sense that Egyptians may find the allure of discounted hydroelectric energy stronger than ever before. (2020). The disadvantages for Egypt and Sudan are the possibility of reduced river flow, although this is only really a problem during the years of filling the dam. The Danger of Multi-Party Democracy and Free Elections in Plural Societies Recognizing the Muslim Brotherhood as a Legitimate Player in Egyptian Politics was a Big Mistake Ethiopian Partnering with ASKY to Establish West African Cargo Hub Ethiopia and China's ZTE singed $800 million mobile deal H and M to build factories in Ethiopia His successor, Mohamed Morsi, said that Egypt was prepared to defend each drop of Nile water with blood. An armed conflict has not emerged, but there are suggestions that Egyptian intelligence services undermined Ethiopia internally by assisting the Oromo Liberation Front in its campaign of civil unrest in Ethiopia in 2016. This was an attempt at a wholesale replacement for the Nile Waters Treaties. The most important of these treaties is the 1997 UN Convention on the Law of Non-Navigational Uses of International Watercourses (the Watercourses Convention). Ethiopia needs regional customers for its hydropower to ensure the economic feasibility of the GERD. Egypt accuses. "The Israeli installation of the missile system around the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam was completed after the Israeli work began in May 2019, considering that it is the first Israeli air defense system abroad that can launch (two types of missiles), the first with a range of 5 km, and the second with a range of 50 kilometer".
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