The Addis Ababa City Courts have civil and petty criminal jurisdictions. Almost all cases are finally disposed of in the Appellate Court. In principle, an appeal lies to the Cassation division of the Federal Supreme Court on matters of law.
The caseload in the 10 City Courts is distributed between civil and criminal cases with an emphasis on criminal cases.
The 50 judges last year disposed of 55,691 criminal matters and 47,733 civil cases – ie:
The Appellate court favours civil appeals (1470 disposed) over criminal (451 disposed).
As with other courts, efficiency of process is a performance indicator and all courts appear to be on top of their respective caseloads.
In the past 12 months, the 240 prosecutors report they disposed of 585 cases (just over 2 cases per prosecutor per year).
The City Police agreed to participate in the research at the close of the collection period and provide case data. The data show they forwarded to the City Prosecutors 786 cases which compare with the 951 recorded as new by the Prosecutors (who can initiate their own investigations).
In the three courts observed, the annual caseload was given as 5, 9 and 11 cases for the year.
The case data recorded in the Social Courts Annual Report 2013 of the performance of the 116 Social Courts in Addis Ababa show
| cases | number of cases planned to be filed | actual number of cases filed | estimated number of cases to be closed by the end of the year VIA trial | closed cases by trial | estimated number of cases to be closed by the end of the year VIA mediation | closed through mediations | total number of cases closed | pending | interrupted |
| civil | 3000 | 1958 | 1390 | 1003 | 1355 | 898 | 1901 | 57 | – |
| petty offences | 1170 | 849 | 738 | 111 | – | ||||
| TOTAL | 2807 | 2012 | 168 | – |
The cases highlighted in red are not counted as they are ‘planned’. The total in yellow is in error (the total of 1901 + 738 = 2639)
The total disposed cases for the year (criminal: 738 + civil: 1901) show a ratio of 23 cases disposed per court in the last year (ie <2 per month per court).