JUSTICE WITHOUT BORDERS: WHEN YOUR CELL BECOMES YOUR HOMECOMING!
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A Parliamentary Decision That Redefines Crime, Punishment, and the Long Road Home!
By Ms Leeshan Kuratey, Ethiopian Tribune Columnist
Here’s a question that should trouble your morning coffee: If you commit a crime in Beijing, should you rot in a Chinese prison, or should you serve your time watching the jacarandas bloom in Addis?
The House of Peoples’ Representatives answered that question, with a series of ratifications that sound bureaucratic but are, in fact, profoundly human. These aren’t just treaties. They’re philosophical statements about justice, belonging, and whether punishment should exile a person twice: once from freedom, and once from home.
Strip away the diplomatic language, and here’s what happened: Ethiopia has now formalized prisoner transfer agreements with China and Brazil, and an extradition treaty with South Africa. Honourable Wzro. Etsegenet Mengistu, Chairperson of the Standing Committee on Law and Justice, presented these proclamations not as legal formalities but as instruments of rehabilitation, a word that deserves more weight than we usually give it.
Her argument? That a prisoner separated from “community, language, and culture” is a prisoner denied the very conditions necessary for transformation. That justice without proximity to one’s roots is punishment without purpose.
Consider this: A young Ethiopian trader, caught in a fraud scheme in São Paulo, sentenced to eight years. Does he emerge reformed after a decade isolated in a Brazilian prison, linguistically adrift, culturally unmoored? Or does he have a better chance at genuine rehabilitation if he serves that time in Ethiopia, where family visits are possible, where the voice of the priest or imam or elder can reach him, where reintegration isn’t an abstraction but a tangible horizon?
But let’s flip the coin. The South Africa extradition agreement operates from a different premise: that geographical borders should not become moral escape hatches. That a crime committed is a debt owed, and fleeing across the Limpopo or the Red Sea doesn’t settle accounts.
Ethiopia’s expanding trade and investment partnerships, particularly with China and South Africa, have created what the Committee delicately termed “opportunities for suspects and offenders to exploit these links.”
Translation: as business booms, so do the loopholes for those who would use commerce as camouflage. A corrupt official siphoning millions. A human trafficker whose network spans Johannesburg to Jijiga. A fraudster leveraging the Ethio-China trade corridor. Without extradition frameworks, these borders become bolt-holes. The treaty says: Not anymore.
For the policy wonk, these agreements are about “incorporating international standards,” “promoting effective international cooperation,” and “strengthening the justice system” the kind of language that sounds impressive in committee rooms but can numb the ordinary citizen. But here’s the layman’s translation: If your son commits a crime abroad, he might come home to serve his time. If a criminal harms your family and flees, we now have tools to bring them back. Both scenarios matter. Both are justice.
Yet questions linger and the House members raised them, to Honourable Etsegenet’s credit. What about political cases masquerading as criminal ones? What safeguards exist against extradition requests weaponized by authoritarian regimes? When does “international cooperation” become complicity in injustice? The proclamations were ratified “by a majority vote”meaning some dissented, and rightly so. These agreements are not perfect instruments. They are calculated risks in an imperfect world.
Here’s what this really asks of us as a society: Do we believe in redemption? Because if we do if we genuinely believe that prisons are not merely cages but crucibles, that sentences are not just punishment but preparation for return then proximity to home isn’t a luxury. It’s a necessity. And if we believe in accountability, if we hold that justice delayed by a border crossing is justice denied, then these extradition frameworks aren’t bureaucratic exercises. They’re moral imperatives.
Ethiopia is growing up in the international arena. These treaties are part of that maturation: the recognition that our citizens will commit crimes abroad, that foreign criminals will exploit our soil, and that 21st-century justice requires 21st-century cooperation. The prisoner transfer agreements say: We claim our own, even in their brokenness. The extradition treaty says: We will not shelter yours, even in your desperation. Both statements are uncomfortable. Both are necessary.
So here’s your morning question again, sharpened: When an Ethiopian criminal comes home to serve time, are we ready to rehabilitate him, or will we merely relocate his cage? And when we extradite a fugitive to face justice abroad, are we confident that justice, not vengeance, awaits?
The House ratified the proclamations. Now the harder work begins: making them mean something beyond the paper they’re printed on. Justice without borders is only as good as the justice within them.
