Stepping Forward or Stumbling Back? Command Responsibility For Failure To Act, Civilian Superiors and the International Criminal Court
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The application of the doctrine of command responsibility (“CR”) to civilian leaders is unsettled under international law. Jurisprudence which has applied CR to civilian leaders has been inconsistent, unprincipled and potentially unjust. International decisions such as the Celebici case at the ICTY suggest that CR can theoretically apply to civilians, but the subsequent Kordic decision indicates that international jurists are extremely wary of extending CR to civilian leaders. The Rome Statute of the nascent International Criminal Court is the first codified international law that explicitly provides for individual criminal liability for civilians on the basis of CR. This paper argues that, given the unsettled status of civilian CR under customary international law, the Rome Statute is an improvement for the mere fact that it explicitly provides CR for civilians. As such, criticisms that the ICC provisions weaken the doctrine in relation to civilian leaders are incorrect because they misconstrue the status quo under international custom. It is not settled under international law whether and to what extent command responsibility even applies to civilians. Moreover, in the few cases in which command responsibility has been used to hold civilians responsible for international crimes, the doctrine has resulted in injustice. As such, the explicit codification of the doctrine in relation to civilians is an improvement on, rather than a regression of, the status quo of CR.
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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 | 0.004 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.022 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.007 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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".