Obeying Restraints: Applying the Plea of Superior Orders to Military Defendants before the International Criminal Court
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Summary This article addresses the content and ramifications of the unique plea of superior orders, illustrating the complexities of absolving wartime behaviour on this basis as well as the legitimate rationale for doing so in certain cases. The article discusses the general legal obligation for soldiers to obey commands; outlines the historical development and legal content of the corresponding plea of superior orders, including its incorporation into theRome Statute of the International Criminal Court(ICC); and assesses the potential future application by the ICC of this specialized “mistake of law” doctrine. The author argues that in light of its moral and practical ramifications it should be considered by the court as both a full defence and a factor in mitigation of sentence, in a manner conceptually distinct from duress. However, the author cautions that the ICC must be careful to encourage, rather than discourage, individual moral autonomy, to the extent possible. A full defence should remain open to soldiers only when they have acted under a reasonable albeit mistaken belief in the legality of their orders. Especially on the modern battlefield, soldiers must continue to act and be judged as “reasoning agents” and not as mere automatons.
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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 | 0.013 | 0.040 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.016 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.008 | 0.013 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.010 | 0.001 |
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".