The Specific Direction Requirement for Aidingand Abetting: A Call for Revisiting ComparativeCriminal Law
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The ‘specific direction’ saga has been dominating the jurisprudence of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia for nearly two years, and the end is yet to be seen. The story centres on the correct interpretation of liability for aiding and abetting, while, at the same time, exposing broader concerns of international criminal law. The saga started with unexpected acquittals of defendants in the Perišić, Stanišić, and Simatović cases due to a lack of specific direction in their aid and assistance towards specific offences. More specifically, the Tribunal found that the traditional test—the provision of aid with the awareness that it would have a substantial effect on the crimes committed in the context of war—was insufficient to create individual criminal responsibility in these cases. The response to this new and heightened interpretation of aiding and abetting followed quickly, as the Šainović et al appeal judgment rejected the novel requirement. After this judgment, the prosecution filed a motion to reconsider the acquittal in Perišić, which the Appeals Chamber denied. In sum, these developments diluted and mischaracterised the standard of aiding and abetting. Accordingly, this article has two purposes. First, it demonstrates that the innovative element of the specific direction lacks a proper foundation in international law. Second, the article discusses several conceptual difficulties with the specific direction requirement, some of which go beyond the issues of accomplice liability. This article concludes by finding that comparative criminal law is essential to resolving the legal conundrum that this standard causes.
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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 | 0.015 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.060 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.014 | 0.022 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.012 | 0.019 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 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".