Searching for Law While Seeking Justice: The Difficulties of Enforcing International Humanitarian Law in International Criminal Trials
Bibliographic record
Abstract
International criminal law finds itself at the confluence of public international law, international humanitarian law, human rights law and national criminal laws. Our understanding of the interrelationship between these sources of law has been hampered by the conventional wisdom that public international law doctrines applicable to disputes between states can be readily transposed to the international criminal prosecution of individuals. A detailed analysis of selected decisions of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia and the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda demonstrates that these tribunals could not simply rely on classical sources of public international law to resolve difficult cases. Further, the experimental approach taken to recasting these sources of law in Article 21 of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court has not resolved fundamental tensions inherent in the international criminal law tradition. Both at the modern ad hoc tribunals and in the Rome Statute, it is argued that difficult cases are decided based on a highly discretionary selection by judges between two competing norms. On one hand, there is the need to enhance humanitarian protection during armed conflict, an ideal embedded in international humanitarian law and particularly the Martens Clause. On the other hand, there is the aim of maximizing fairness to the accused, an ideal enshrined in the growing body of international human rights law and codified in Article 21(3) of the Rome Statute. This article seeks to illuminate these fundamental tensions within the international criminal law jurisprudence at a foundational moment when the ICC begins hearing its first set of cases.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.136 | 0.283 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.026 | 0.082 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.044 | 0.032 |
| Open science | 0.007 | 0.017 |
| Research integrity | 0.019 | 0.021 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".