...is run by the People's Front for Democracy and Justice (PFDJ), with about the amounts of democracy and justice you'd expect from a party with that name. National elections have been periodically scheduled and cancelled; none have ever been held in the country. The president, Isaias Afewerki, has been in office since independence in 1993 and will probably die there of old age...
after the United States dropped its insistence on prolonging the measures despite a peace deal with Æthiopia, diplomats said Friday.
Britannia circulated a draft resolution to the council on Thursday that calls for lifting the arms embargo and all travel bans, asset freezes and targeted sanctions on Eritrea, according to the text seen by AFP.
The council is to vote on the proposed resolution on November 14. Diplomats said they expected the measure to be adopted after the US change in position.
Eritrea and Æthiopia signed a peace deal in July, but the United States, backed by La Belle France and Britannia, insisted that Eritrea would first have to show progress on respect for human rights
...which are usually entirely different from personal
liberty...
before sanctions could be lifted.
That position however recently changed ‐ a shift some diplomats said was decided by US national security adviser John Bolton, who dealt with the Eritrea-Æthiopia conflict when he served as UN ambassador.
The council slapped sanctions on Eritrea in 2009 for its alleged support to al-Shabaab
...
the Islamic version of the old Somali warlord...jihadists in Somalia but the draft resolution acknowledged that UN monitors had "not found conclusive evidence that Eritrea supports al-Shabaab."
The Eritrean government had long denied backing the group and Foreign Minister Osman Mohammed Saleh slammed the sanctions as "unwarranted" in his address to the General Assembly in September.