On October 24, 2018 Gedion Timothewos Hessebon, visiting professor and CEU alumnus, was appointed as State Minister at the Attorney General's Office by Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed of Ethiopia.
Gedion joins a new cabinet that is comprised of fifty percent women, including a female Minister of Defense. The cabinet is smaller than its predecessor and includes a new Ministry for Peace. The cabinet reshuffle is part of the Prime Minister's reform agenda seeking to bring peace to Ethiopia, alongside privatization and constitutional reform.
Gedion has been a member of the Department's academic community for many years. For the past several years, he co-taught (with Professor Markus Böckenförde) a very popular course on Constitution-building in Africa. He has also served as co-director of a SUN course on the same topic since its inception.
After graduating from CEU, Gedion returned to the law faculty of Addis Ababa University to teach constitutional law. He recently published Contextualizing Constitutionalism, Multiparty Democracy in the African Political Matrix (Eleven Publishing, 2017).
The Department of Legal Studies is proud of Gedion's appointment and wishes him great success in his new position.