Falling between the Cracks: The Special Tribunal for Lebanon's Jurisdictional Gaps as Obtacles to Achieving Justice and Public Legitmacy
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The entry into force of the Special Tribunal for Lebanon has been the first serious effort for accountability and ending impunity for political assassinations in Lebanon’s modern history. Nevertheless, the past experiences of United Nations International Independent Investigation Commission and recently the STL have revealed challenges and lacunae in their investigative process. This includes, inter alia, a complex and ambiguous relation between UNIIIC’s activities and the STL, the failure of the Tribunal in preventing successive leaks of confidential documents and witnesses interviews, and weak outreach to the public over false testimonies before UNIIIC. This article argues that while the STL’s role remains crucial for ending impunity for the first time in such a torn society, the STL as an international (ad hoc) tribunal is not well equipped to deal with all unpredicted variables in law and policy. The STL Statute is silent on these complex variables, while the recent amendments of the Rules of Procedure and Evidence fall short to tackle these lacunae as they apply prospectively and not retroactivity. The nascent jurisprudence of the Tribunal succeeded in asserting jurisdiction over the Application of one individual affected by false testimonies before UNIIIC, however it relied on the inherent jurisdiction of the Tribunal without delving into the legal relation between UNIIIC’s activities and the STL. This has been unfortunate, as the STL’s jurisprudence until the time of writing of this article has not been able to contribute for overcoming some of these shortages and lacunae. To overcome these hurdles and to regain trust in the STL, the Tribunal is called upon to take a series of administrative and legislative measures of which the public should be informed and not alienated, as justice is not only about doing it, but also about the perception of doing justice. The article concludes by urging the STL to correct the existing errors hand in hand with continuously trying to achieve justice and accountability for all offences and misconducts, including its own.
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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 | 0.010 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.021 | 0.024 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.017 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.011 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.007 |
| 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".