Note: This piece is an excerpt from an upcoming law review article titled “The Dark Future of Privacy in Ethiopia, And How to Stop It”  Opening  Ethiopia doesn't have laws specifically designed to deal with privacy and data protection issues except a few set of rules contained in various pieces of legislation that guarantee right to privacy rather in a very indirect fashion. The major sources of Ethiopian law dealing with privacy and data protection issues can generally be grouped into four categories. These are: (1) the constitution, (2) international human rights instruments, (3) subsidiary laws and (4) case law. This piece briefly highlights these sources of Ethiopian privacy law. In so doing, it aims to provide a synopsis of Ethiopia's operational privacy rules.

The Ethiopian law of tax enforcement experienced a drastic change following the tax reforms of the 2002. Introduction of self-executing tax enforcement mechanisms was among the grand shifts in the country’s tax system. Previously, the only means of ensuring prompt and certain collection of delinquent taxes was through the time taking judicial proceeding. The disapproved judicial means of enforcing delinquent taxes is now replaced by a self-executing enforcement scheme called ‘tax foreclosure.’