The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Türk, condemned what he described as an ongoing campaign of forced mass recruitment of civilians, including children, by the TPLF across Tigray.
The campaign, the UN said, has been accompanied by reports of killings, torture, arbitrary detention, forced displacement and other reprisals against people who resist — and against their families. Among those being targeted, it said, are former combatants who were demobilised in late 2025: men who had already put down their weapons under the peace deal and are now being pulled back in.
The accusation nobody is repeating
This has not travelled. The statement was issued on 25 September and reported by Addis Standard the following day; we found it again in a legal news service and in a handful of wire briefs. It has not become a story.
Part of the reason is timing — it landed in the same week as drone strikes on the capital and a diplomatic rupture with Eritrea, both of which are easier to report. Part of it is that Tigray is cut off, so there is nobody there to follow it up.
The same statement accuses the government
Türk's statement is not one-sided, and reading it as an indictment of one party would misrepresent it.
In the same breath the UN reports that Ethiopian airstrikes, including reported drone strikes, hit five schools in Tigray on 22 September, causing deaths and injuries, and that a mortar strike killed civilians in Kobo, in Amhara, the next day. It also notes "disturbing reports of arbitrary conscription by government forces".
That symmetry is the most useful thing about the statement. An office that accuses both sides in one document is harder to dismiss as taking a side, and the accusations against each are the ones that party would least like made.
What we could not do
We could not obtain the UN's own statement. The OHCHR website returns an error to our archiver, and the Internet Archive would not capture a mirror of it either. So we are working from two independent reports of a document we have not read, which is a weaker position than it sounds and we would rather say so than hide it.
The UN gives no numbers: no count of those recruited, no count of children, no casualty figure for the schools. It does not say how it established any of it.
And the region it is describing has had no phone or internet service since around 25 September. The one check that would settle most of this — talking to people in Tigray — is the one nobody can currently do.