## ANNUAL REPORT 2022
A community-led human rights organisation focused on Eritrea and Eritrean refugees registered in England and Wales (1198077)
## TABLE OF CONTENT
**Who we are.................................................3 Foreword.....................................................4 Activities..................................................5-9 Financial overview..................................10 Governance and management...........11 Trustees...............................................12-13**
## WHO WE ARE
One Day Seyoum (ODS) is a community-led organisation focused on human rights abuses in Eritrea and against Eritrean refugees. We produce media, art and events to raise awareness about the issues we work on. We organise campaigns and publish research to advocate for change. We run support programmes helping Eritrean refugees with asylumrelated issues, mental health and professional development. We organise capacity building initiatives to increase the strength of the movement.
A decade since its founding, ODS is one of the most prominent Eritrean human rights organisations in exile. We have over 500 members and combine virtual and in-person activities to achieve impact. Our membership mostly comprises of young people (18-35 years old) and are a mix of Eritrea and diaspora-born Eritreans, and allies. ODS focuses heavily on community engagement and has provided a unique space for people across the movement to learn and get involved.
We are regularly invited to speak and collaborate by institutions like the United Nations, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and news organisations like CNN, BBC and Al Jazeera.
## FOREWORD
I am an Eritrean who was born in the diaspora and raised hearing stories about my home country. When I was five years old, my uncle Seyoum Tsehaye was imprisoned without trial. The older I got, the more I learnt about his case and its connection to the larger crisis in the country. He had been imprisoned in September 2001 as the government was shutting down institutions and imprisoning individuals who were considered a threat to their power. Since then, Eritrea has been experiencing a dire human rights crisis that has forced over 500,000 people to flee.
I started One Day Seyoum in 2013 because I was frustrated by the lack of attention the Eritrean human rights crisis was getting. I wanted to create a space where people, especially young people, could learn more about the crisis and get involved with the human rights movement. The organisation was started in my uncle's name with the aim of continuing his mission. One Day Seyoum was started as a club at my high school in Sweden and quickly spread online and to more schools across the world. By 2020, we had become one of the most active and prominent Eritrean human rights organisations in exile. We were still volunteer run and had no funded programs, but were running several successful programs with the help of our members. Despite our success, we knew that we could to do even more. The magnitude of the Eritrean human rights crisis - both inside and outside of the country was immense, and we did not have the capacity to adequately respond to it. The crisis required professional, funded, full-time and strategic civil society. Eritrean civil society is weak - we are forbidden from existing inside the country and the groups outside are, just like us, run by volunteers in our spare time. We knew that we had the perfect base to build from and that the next step was to turn One Day Seyoum into a professional and funded organisation. We started the charity registration process that year and finally received our status in 2022.
We decided to slow down our activities in 2022 to have enough time to facilitate this transition. We reviewed our past work and analysed the overall human rights movement and the political climate we were operating in. We wanted to understand how change could happen and what our role in facilitating that change would be. From there, we built our new organisational structure, restructured our programs and wrote our new strategy.
We are very excited about One Day Seyoum’s future and cannot wait to become the organisation we think that the Eritrean people deserve. None of our work would be possible without our members and supporters and we cannot wait to continue this journey alongside you all.
**Vanessa Tsehaye Founder and Executive Director**
## ACTIVITIES
**As outlined in the foreword, we slowed down our activities in 2022 to focus on restructuring the organisation. As you can read in our 10 year report (which you can access on our website), we had the least amount of activity in 2022 out of all our years that we have 2013-2023 and that was because we needed the time to focus on development so that we could build something stronger that could have even more impact. Here are the activities that we did run in 2022:**
## **Magazine**
We run a magazine called _2001 magazine_ , named after the year the free press was shut down in Eritrea. The goal of our magazine is to create informative, thought provoking and engaging content that will inform our audiences about the key issues we work on and motivate them to get involved. Our inaugural issue was published in 2021 and featured pieces from leading Eritrean writers, artists, and activists, as well as allies to our cause, who have all created work around the theme: _"The Past, Present, and Future of Eritrea."_ The magazine received overwhelmingly positive feedback and was profiled by the Columbia Journalism Review. By 2022, we had sold 328 copies and set up a team that started preparing for the next issue of the magazine.
## ACTIVITIES
## **Campaigns:**
## _Commemorating Patriarch Abune Antonios_
In 2005, Patriarch Abune Antonios was unlawfully detained by the Eritrean government after criticising them. In 2022, he died after 16 years in detention. In collaboration with Amnesty International, we organised an event on Twitter spaces to commemorate his life & discuss the systematic practice of unlawful detentions in Eritrea. Invited speakers included the archbishops nephew and esteemed Eritrean journalist Saleh Gadi Johar who knew the archbishop personally. The event had over 150 attendees and received very positive feedback.
## _#StopKhartoumKidnappings_
In early 2022, we started receiving reports about Sudanense security officials kidnapping refugees off the streets of Sudan’s capital Khartoum – sometimes even from their homes or workplaces. A vast majority of the affected refugees were Eritreans. We started documenting these cases - interviewing refugees who were still in detention and who had been freed.
Once we had collected enough information, we launched a public campaign calling on Sudanese authorities to immediately stop these kidnappings. We published our findings and launched a petition. We mobilised our community to raise awareness about the issue online and to sign and spread the petition.
## ACTIVITIES
## _Honouring Eritrean Women & Girls_
On International Women's Day, we ran a campaign shining a light on the suffering Eritrean women and girls experience. The campaign focused on Eritrean women and girls experience in prisons, in the national service and during their migration journeys to safety. We specifically highlighted five cases: 1) 21 year-old Yohanna, one of the victims of the Lampedusa tragedy who drowned while giving birth. The premature baby boy was still attached to the umbilical cord when rescuers found their bodies. 2) Twen Thedros, a young woman who was arrested after she was found participating in an evening prayer meeting in an underground church. She was never charged, tried or had access to a lawyer. She is reportedly held in the notoriously brutal prison Mai Sirwa, where she has endured terrible beatings and torture. 3) Aster Fissehatsion, a liberation fighter who was arrested alongside other members of the G15 group in September 2001 after calling for democratic reforms. No one knows where she is being held or if she’s still alive. 4) Aster Yohannes is the wife of Petros Solomon who is a former Minister of Foreign Affairs who was arrested alongside other members of the G15 group in September 2001 after calling for democratic reforms. She was studying in the US at the time of her husbands arrest and was promised by Eritrean authorities that she would be safe if she tried to return to her children. She was arrested at the airport in December 2003. Their children have not seen any of their parents since they were arrested over 20 years ago. 5) We also highlighted Ciham Ali’s case, which we will be discussing in more detail below.
## ACTIVITIES
## _#FreeCiham_
Ciham Ali is a US-Eritrean national born in Los Angeles and raised in Eritrea. On 8 December 2012, when she was just 15 years of age, she was arrested by the Eritrean authorities. 11 years later, she remains detained without ever having been tried or charged. Ciham has not had access to her family and lawyers since she was arrested. Her family does not even know where she is being held or her state of health. Under international law, this amounts to an enforced disappearance. Ciham was arrested at the border to Sudan as she tried to flee the country. This happened shortly after her father Ali Abdu, then a foreign minister in President Isaias Afwerki’s government, defected and fled to exile. Despite being a US national, the US government has not intervened in her case.
We have actively campaigned for Ciham for several years, targeting a variety of political actors with ties to Ciham. In 2021, we launched the #FreeCiham campaign with Amnesty International specifically targeting United State secretary of state Antony Blinken. We mobilised support for the campaign through a petition and started organising online and in-person events to raise awareness about her case and increase support for the campaign. The aim of the campaign was also to show solidarity with Ciham and her loved ones. We also started a lobbying campaign in DC alongside the mobilisation efforts. We continued these activities in 2022.
On Ciham’s 25th birthday on April 3rd 2022, we mobilised our and Amnesty’s membership to celebrate her birthday online and in-person. People shared birthday messages and pictures of cakes and balloons they had organised to celebrate Ciham. We organised a virtual birthday party for her on Twitter spaces to talk about her case, how people could get involved and to answer questions. Students in Brussels organised an action outside the US embassy to raise awareness about her case and pressure the embassy to raise her case to the state department in DC. The action included a fashion show where they dressed in purple, Ciham’s favourite colour. They ended the action with a meeting with the ambassador.
On the ten year anniversary of Ciham’s arrest, December 8th 2022, we organised another action to increase support for the campaign. We asked people to light a candle in solidarity with Ciham and post a picture of it online to raise awareness about her case. We continued to push the petition as a part of the campaign. The campaign was supported with press releases and social media posts from Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International. Jack Dorsey, the founder of Twitter, also tweeted in support of the campaign.
By the end of 2022, the petition for Ciham had garnered at least 430,000 signatures.
## ACTIVITIES
## **Support services:**
We continued running our support programmes for Eritrean refugees and asylum seekers. Our casework service connected Eritrean refugees to volunteers who assisted them with broad-ranging concerns, from emergency to routine. Our casework service also supported Eritrean refugees who were interested in receiving study and career guidance. The volunteers provided a range of services such as resume advice, career chats, university applications guidance, and finding relevant opportunities. We also have online resources on our website that include lists of organisations, services and opportunities that Eritrean refugees can benefit from in all areas of life. We also have information guides on relevant issues to give them practical and useful advice, including CV guides, advice on writing applications for scholarships and other opportunities. We continued to update these resources in 2022.
Our services were used by Eritrean refugees in several countries, including the United Kingdom, Ireland, Sweden, Germany, Ethiopia, Sudan, South Africa and the United States.
## **Community mobilisation:**
Having a large, informed and motivated community is essential to us. It makes it possible for us to do more work, as we have more individuals volunteering in our team. It also makes our work more successful - as we have more individuals to take action with our campaigns and push our informative content online. Our membership is free and offers a space for Eritreans and allies who want to learn more, get to know like-minded people, stay informed about our initiatives, work directly with our teams when they have time and get trainings on skills beneficial to the movement. In 2022, we continued to grow and foster our community through our membership. We organised regular members meetings, sent out members newsletter, organised training sessions on campaigning and recruited new members online. We only met and worked virtually but started planning how we can resume our in-person members activities that we stopped when the covid restrictions started in 2020.
By the end of 2022, we had 436 members in over 150 cities worldwide.
## FINANCIAL OVERVIEW
Our expenditure was 491.51 GBP. These costs covered the costs for our website and the annual fee for our domain.
We did not fundraise during the year and had no income. Instead, we used the reserves that we had prior to registering as a charity.
Our reserves at the end of the financial year was 16,833.37 GBP,
## GOVERNANCE AND MANAGEMENT
Our governing document is a 'constitution of a Charitable Incorporated Organisation whose only voting members are its charity trustees.
There must be at least three charity trustees. If the number falls below this minimum, the remaining trustee or trustees may act only to call a meeting of the charity trustees, or appoint a new charity trustee. The maximum number of charity trustees is 10. The charity trustees may not appoint any charity trustee if as a result the number of charity trustees would exceed the maximum.
Apart from the first charity trustees, every trustee must be appointed [for a term of 2 years] by a resolution passed at a properly convened meeting of the charity trustees.In selecting individuals for appointment as charity trustees, the charity trustees must have regard to the skills, knowledge and experience needed for the effective administration of the CIO.
A charity trustee ceases to hold office if he or she: (a) retires by notifying the CIO in writing (but only if enough charity trustees will remain in office when the notice of resignation takes effect to form a quorum for meetings); (b) is absent without the permission of the charity trustees from all their meetings held within a period of six months and the trustees resolve that his or her office be vacated; (c) dies; (d) in the written opinion, given to the company, of a registered medical practitioner treating that person, has become physically or mentally incapable of acting as a director and may remain so for more than three months; (e) is disqualified from acting as a charity trustee by virtue of sections 178180 of the Charities Act 2011 (or any statutory re-enactment or modification of that provision).
Any person retiring as a charity trustee is eligible for reappointment.
## TRUSTEES
## **During the period 2022, the following persons were trustees:**
Vanessa Tsehaye - Appointed as trustee on 28/02/2022.
Andom Ghebreghiorgis - Appointed as trustee on 28/02/2022. Haben Fecadu - Appointed as trustee on 28/02/2022. Andrew Gregg - Appointed as trustee on 28/02/2022. Briona Gander - Appointed as trustee on 28/02/2022, resigned on 20/04/2022.
## **TRUSTEE DECLARATIONS**
## **Declarations**
The Trustees declare that they have approved the Trustees’ report above.
Signed on behalf of the charity’s Trustees.
Vanessa Tsehaye 22 / 05 / 2024 _Signature_ …………………….. _Date_ ............................
Andom Ghebreghiorgis 22 / 05 / 2024 _Signature_ …………………….. _Date_ ............................
Haben Fecadu 26 / 05 / 2024 _Signature_ …………………….. _Date_ ............................
Andrew Gregg 28 / 05 / 2024 _Signature_ …………………….. _Date_ ............................
Doc ID: aa6150488f12ba4adb7ad579c25703536f42d189
|||**One Day Seyoum**|**One Day Seyoum**|||||||||**1198077**|**1198077**|**1198077**|**1198077**||||||
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**492-**
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**492-**
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|**Section B Statement of assets and liabilities at the end of the period**|||||||
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**B1 Cash funds**|**Details**
Reserves that we had prior to registering as a
charity|||**Unrestricted**
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**to nearest £**|**Restricted funds**
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|**B2 Other monetary assets**
**B3 Investment assets**
**B4 Assets retained for the charity’s**
**own use**
**B5 Liabilities**
Signed by one or two trustees on behalf of all
the trustees|**Details**|**Unrestricted**
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Date of approval
23 / 05 / 2024
26 / 05 / 2024|
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|||||Date of approval|
|||Haben Fecadu||26 / 05 / 202|
|||VANESSA TSEHAYE||23 / 05 / 202|
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