Gender and the Charles Taylor Case at the Special Court for Sierra Leone
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In a landmark trial judgment on April 26, 2012, the Special Court for Sierra Leone (SCSL) convicted Charles Taylor, former President of Liberia, of aiding and abetting and planning crimes against humanity and war crimes during the armed conflict in Sierra Leone. Analysis of Taylor’s prosecution has tended to focus on issues such as his indictment while a Head of State and his link to ‘blood’ diamonds. Less attention has been paid, however, to gender issues arising in Taylor’s case. This article begins by exploring the gender-related charges against Taylor: the crimes against humanity of rape and sexual slavery, the war crime of outrages upon personal dignity, and the war crime of committing acts of terror (including through sexual violence). Next, the article explores how the Court viewed the issue of cumulative charges, especially with respect to rape and sexual slavery. Third, this article discusses the modes of liability used to find Taylor guilty and their link to the gender-related crimes. Finally, this article concludes with a positive evaluation of what the Taylor trial judgment has added to international criminal law’s understanding of gender-based crimes. For example, the judgment has shed light on the different ways in which sexual and gender-based crimes are used in armed conflict to assert power and control. It has also assisted in solidifying the international legal definition of sexual slavery. It raised important questions about whether forced marriage should instead be called ‘conjugal slavery’, and it clarified that an individual may be subject to convictions for the crimes against humanity of rape and sexual slavery or the war crimes of committing acts of terror and sexual violence.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.011 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.028 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.013 | 0.012 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".