The Special Court for Sierra Leone, Child Soldiers, and Forced Marriage: Providing Clarity or Confusion?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Summary This article considers the first two trial, and corresponding first two appeal, judgments issued by the Special Court for Sierra Leone in what are commonly referred to as the Armed Forces Revolutionary Council (AFRC) and Civil Defence Forces (CDF) cases. These judgments are noteworthy for having been the first to adjudicate at the international level the war crime of conscription or enlistment of children under the age of fifteen or using them to participate actively in hostilities and the gender-based crime against humanity of forced marriage. Beginning with the issue of child soldiers, this article explores how the Special Court addressed the applicable elements of crime, the abduction of children, the role of initiation within the act of conscription or enlistment of child soldiers, and the definition of use of children to participate actively in hostilities. The second part of this article discusses how the AFRC judgments addressed the crime against humanity of forced marriage. In comparison, the CDF Trial Chamber avoided consideration of this crime, and the Appeals Chamber’s partial criticism of this approach could not correct the negative silence created within the Special Court’s record of gender-based atrocities by the CDF. The article concludes that the AFRC and CDF judgments raise issues that require further consideration. For example, what is the legal linkage between abductions and child soldier recruitment, and how does one distinguish between active and non-active participation of children under fifteen in hostilities? These judgments also point to the dangers involved in misunderstanding a gender-based crime such as forced marriage solely as a crime of a sexual nature, and the way in which a trial record can be irrevocably altered by the unbalanced exclusion of gender-based crimes.
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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 | 0.018 | 0.054 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.014 | 0.022 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.026 | 0.011 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.016 | 0.016 |
| 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".