Men walking on the sidewalk of the causeway in Eritrea's Red Sea port of Massawa.
Image by: AFP
The human rights violations occurred on a "scope and scale seldom witnessed elsewhere", a three-member team of UN-appointed investigators said.
They made accusations against figures and groups across Eritrean society, from the army to the interior ministry, police and Isaias Afwerki, the president.
"Systematic, widespread and gross human rights violations have been and are being committed in Eritrea under the authority of the government," the investigators said.
The report, produced after a year-long investigation, was published in Geneva yesterday.
It describes a litany of extrajudicial killings, wide-spread torture, sexual slavery and enforced labour.
"The government has created and sustained repressive systems to control, silence and isolate individuals in the country, depriving them of their fundamental freedoms," the report's authors said.
Eritreans, the UN said, were routinely abused, exploited and enslaved for indefinite periods.
The investigators also described a mass-surveillance society in which neighbours and family members are encouraged to inform on each other and where people can be held for years in horrific conditions without ever knowing what crime they committed.
Mauritian Sheila Keet-haruth, the first UN special rapporteur on human rights in Eritrea, described the situation as "desperately bleak".
In January, her team spoke to Eritrean exiles in Britain and 550 witnesses in Djibouti, Ethiopia, Sweden, Germany and the US.
They were not permitted to enter Eritrea.
"Many potential witnesses residing outside Eritrea were afraid to testifybecause they assumed they were still being clandestinely monitored by the authorities and feared for their safety and for family members back in Eritrea," the report said.
Last year, the UN refugee agency counted nearly 360,000 refugees worldwide from Eritrea, which broke away from Ethiopia in 1991.
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