The Rights to Remain Silent under Ethiopian legal framework and It’s Implementation: the Case of Bale Zone

The main purpose of criminal justice is to provide rehabilitation and correctional facilities for those who have violated the criminal law and enable them to show attitudinal and behavioral changes. To this end, the whole process of detection, investigation, interrogation, prosecution, and punishment of offenders in the enforcement of the criminal law has to respect the human rights of suspected or accused persons. Among, various human rights of accused and arrested persons discussed under the FDRE constitution, the main one is the right to remain silent. The main objective of this study is to assess the practicalimplementation of the right to remain silent in the Bale Zone. The scope of this study is limited to exploring the practical implementation of the right to remain silent in the Bale Zone. To achieve this predetermined objective, the research employed both qualitative and quantitative research approaches. Among the 18 Woredas Bale Zone, eight woredas are randomly selected using the lottery method. Police officers, judges, public prosecutors, and arrested persons are the major sources of primary data, whereas secondary data is collected from Bale zone police stations, dead cases, published and online sources. Both open-ended and closed-ended questionnaire, interviews, FGD, observation and document analysis is used as data collection instruments. The findings of this study revealed that the right to remain silent is not generally implemented in the Bale zone Keywords: Right to remain silent, investigation, interrogation