Boundary Commission to open field office in Adigrat

The independent Eritrea-Ethiopia Boundary Commission (EEBC) is to open a field office in Ethiopia's Tigray region – which borders Eritrea - on Monday to ensure the speedy implementation of border demarcation.

In a statement – released after a mid-July meeting in The Hague between both sides - the EEBC said the office, to be established in the town of Adigrat, would enable staff to "resume" survey work.

The move follows calls by the president of the commission, Sir Elihu Lauterpacht, for Ethiopia to lift a ban on EEBC surveyors carrying out their work in the contested border area. He said
he had personally urged the Ethiopian authorities to lift the ban before the start of the rainy season.

The Ethiopians imposed the ban on 27 April, but reports say it has now been lifted so that the field office in Adigrat could be up and running by the EEBC's deadline of 31 July.

The EEBC was set up as part of a peace deal between Ethiopia and Eritrea following their two-year border war which broke out in May 1998. It was tasked with drawing up a 1,000-km international boundary between the countries and then physically marking it out.

The UN Mission in Ethiopia and Eritrea (UNMEE) said the meeting in The Hague was called to iron out some “hiccups” in the demarcation process.

“This was the point of the meetings in The Hague, to clarify what could be done to solve those hiccups,” said an UNMEE spokeswoman on Friday at a weekly video-link press briefing in
the two capitals.

She confirmed that construction of the Adigrat office was on schedule and it would be open before the 31 July deadline. Currently the EEBC has a field office in the Eritrean capital Asmara and one in Addis Ababa.