Lawfare and International Tribunals: A Question of Definition: A Reflection on the Creation of the "Khmer Rouge Tribunal
Bibliographic record
Abstract
I must confess that in over twenty-one years of criminal prosecution, both national and international, I had never encountered the term -law-fare until I received the invitation to attend this conference.After my initial research and the different presentations here, I understand better why.It seems to me that this term has essentially evolved out of a U.S. military and political context and therefore has had little resonance in international criminal law. 1 From the various attempts at definitions, it does appear to boil down to the use of the judicial system to further political aims, which, I submit, is an essential function of any system of laws. 2 That those aims seem to run counter to prevailing norms or government interest does not appear to change the nature of the system itself which, if it is sound, will assert itself through the proper application of those very laws.Laws are used to express and define the society that elaborates them.They are an evolving reflection of that society, and equating that process to armed conflict seems to me to distort their purpose.If, however, we intend lawfare to equate to what is more traditionally viewed as political interference in the application of justice, then yes, lawfare is practiced in International Criminal Law.For example, it is quite clear that political considerations played a fundamental part in the creation of the Extraordinary Chambers within the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC), for which I was the first International Co-Prosecutor.* Robert Petit was the first International Co Prosecutor for the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia from 2006 to 2009 and is now a Counsel with the War Crimes Section of the Ministry of Justice of Canada.The opinions expressed herein are solely his own.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".