The Role of Evidence in War Crimes Trials: The Common Law and the Yugoslav Tribunal
Bibliographic record
Abstract
With the passing into law of the War Crimes Act 1991, the United Kingdom joined such nation states with common law legal systems as Canada and Australia in conferring jurisdiction upon its domestic courts to try individuals suspected of having committed war crimes in Europe during the Second World War. On April 1, 1999, Anthony Sawoniuk became the first person to be convicted under the 1991 Act. The conviction came after an eight-week trial, before a jury at the Central Criminal Court in London, into allegations that Sawoniuk had murdered several Jewish civilians when he took part in ‘search and kill’ operations directed towards those who had escaped the mass slaughter of some 2,900 Jewish civilians in September 1942 on the Jewish festival of Yom Kippur. This research considers the significance of R v Sawoniuk. The case is used as a backdrop for an assessment of the role played by rules of evidence in securing a fair trial for, and testing the case against, war crimes suspects. The study examines whether and to what extent, evidential and procedural rules generally associated with common law legal systems and as applied in domestic, common law trials of suspected war criminals, present barriers to conviction distinct from those discernible in war crimes trials considered in international criminal tribunals.
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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 | 0.046 | 0.119 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.046 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.025 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.010 |
| Research integrity | 0.008 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".