In the wake of the two-year armed conflict in northern Ethiopia (2020–2022), the Ethiopian government adopted a National Transitional Justice Policy in April 2024 that envisions redress through accountability, truth-seeking, reparations, institutional reform, and guarantees of non-recurrence, yet contains a critical omission, the absence of any legal pathway to address egregious human rights violations committed by third-state actors, most notably Eritrean forces. This article interrogates the incapacity of a purely domestic transitional justice framework to confront transnational crimes through a comparative legal analysis that develops a typology of accountability models, systematically examining the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, the hybrid Special Court for Sierra Leone, and Colombia's domestic Special Jurisdiction for Peace against criteria of jurisdictional reach, domestic legitimacy, international judicial authority, and political feasibility. The analysis reveals that despite the policy's current silence on extraterritorial violations, viable accountability alternatives exist, with the hybrid tribunal model exemplified by the Special Court for Sierra Leone emerging as the most salient template due to its calibrated blend of domestic ownership and international legal authority capable of prosecuting foreign nationals while insulating proceedings from local political interference, complemented by the potential invocation of universal jurisdiction and the establishment of independent international commissions of inquiry for evidence preservation. The article recommends that Ethiopia's transitional justice process can only achieve its stated goals through a fundamental renegotiation of its extant framework, requiring active collaboration with the African Union to establish either a dedicated hybrid tribunal or an independent international investigative mechanism explicitly mandated to probe transnational crimes, thereby transforming the policy from an instrument of selective political management into a legitimate cornerstone of sustainable peace.
Jara Samuel (Fri,) studied this question.