After mediation from Qatar, in June 2010, Eritrea withdrew its troops from the Ras Doumeira area and Doumeira island, which belonged to Djibouti. In 2010, the Eritrean Joint Ethiopian Border Commission also had to abandon Ethiopia to leave the Badme area occupied by the country. Both countries continued to refuse to pay the mutual compensation the Commission had imposed on them.
Throughout 2010, Eritrea sought to improve relations with its neighboring countries, and also contacted the Arab League in order to get the league to work for lifting UN sanctions.
In March 2012, Ethiopia attacked a series of Eritrean military deployments along the border between the two countries. Ethiopia declared recognition of training and support Eritrea had provided Ethiopian rebels with.
The West’s isolation of Eritrea has resulted in the country increasingly working with China, which has invested in a number of development projects in the country and in 2014 bought 60% of the Zara gold mine.
In September 2014, the UN Human Rights Council set up a commission of inquiry to investigate the human rights situation in Eritrea. According to thesciencetutor, commission representatives were from Ghana, Mauritius and Australia. The Commission issued a report in June 2015. It has investigated a wide range of human rights violations since the country’s independence, and found that there could be crimes against humanity. The refugee flow continued out of Eritrea through 2015, but many European countries closed their borders during the year, justifying the rejection of especially Eritrean asylum seekers with improving the situation in the country. Acc. By the end of 2015, UNHCR had 474,000 Eritreans fled their country, representing 12% of the population.
In September 2015, a joint venture company consisting of the Canadian Sunridge Gold Corp and Eritrean National Mining Corporation (ENAMCO) signed an agreement with the Ministry of Energy and Miner on the extraction of gold, copper and zinc.
The ambivalence in the presentation of the situation in Eritrea was illustrated when the Danish Ministry of Justice in autumn 2014 prepared a report on the situation in the country. The first edition of the report noted that there were improvements in tracking the human rights situation in the country. However, this discourse ran counter to the prominent discourse in the West and the report was therefore rewritten to make it far more critical of the country.
To break international isolation, Eritrea signed agreements with Saudi Arabia and the UAE in December 2015 to support their war against Yemen. In turn, the two Arab dictatorship states supported construction projects in Eritrea.
In June 2016, new clashes between the Eritrean and Ethiopian forces along the border came. Several hundred were reported killed.
Thousands of Eritreans fled the country through 2016 despite a ban on leaving the country and a “shoot to kill” policy along the Ethiopian border. In April, 11 new conscripted and random passers-by were killed in Asmara as they tried to escape from the truck they were on. The primary reason for the desire for escape was the continued mandatory military service, which for some people reached 20 years or more.
In June 2016, the UN submitted to the Commission on Human Rights Investigation in Eritrea report. It concluded that the authorities were responsible for crimes against humanity committed since independence in 1991 including slavery, disappearances, arbitrary detention, torture, rape and murder.
