Extralegal Governance and Executive Overreach in Tigray during the 2020–2022 War and Its Aftermath: Impacts on Judicial Independence

The 2020–2022 war in Tigray has among other things led to constitutional and legal crises that implicated and reorganized the entire governance structures and judicial independence in the region. Judicial independence was affected through wartime and post-war executive and administrative interventions issued in the name of collective security and necessity. This article examines how war-induced extralegal governance facilitated executive overreach and progressively undermined judicial independence during and after the Tigray war. It raises and answers the core question :How and to what extent did wartime and post-war emergency governance mechanisms erode judicial independence? To that end, it used doctrinal research methodology and qualitative doctrinal legal analysis, supported by case law and selected comparative constitutional materials. The article argues that Tigray hosted a confluence of hybrid legal orders confusing the legal community in which formal constitutional judicial guarantees coexisted and functioned with emergency-derived and extralegal and informal governance practices. The findings show the emergence of a hybrid and competing legal order in which formal constitutional guarantees coexist with informal enforcement mechanisms and extralegal decision-making structures. Since the onset of the war, Tigray authorities issued a range of executive instruments including emergency regulations, martial rules, rules of liberated areas and transitional regulations and directives along with preexisting regular laws. The emergency regulatory measures s that purportedly started as responses to war-driven existential threats established the new governance normality. The continuing executive and militarized control over judicial processes and decisions attenuated judicial independence, property rights, labor rights and access to justice. The article generally concludes that the entrenchment of extralegal governance enabled executive overreach and produced persistent institutional restraints on judicial independence in Tigray. It recommends the restoration of constitutional and institutional governance. This necessitates consolidated judicial independence and institutional checks and balance by controlling emergency normalization and institutionalization.