Equal Liability for All Members of a Joint Criminal Enterprise? Lubanga Continues the Deficiencies of the Ad Hoc Tribunals
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper argues that PTC I’s interpretation of Article 25(3)(a) in the decision on the confirmation of charges in Lubanga for joint control over a crime perpetuates the ICTY’s overbroad interpretation of liability within a joint criminal enterprise. This misinterpretation places mistaken equal liability for all JCE members irrespective of their role. Specifically, the Court does not define ‘essential contribution’ in the objective elements of joint control and leaves open the possibility for subsequent judges to place a low bar for determining a principal to the crime thereby placing liability on marginalized members of a joint enterprise, even if those members had a perfunctory role that could frustrate the crime’s realization. Also, in the subjective elements — specifically the second element in which the accused and co-perpetrators must be mutually aware and mutually accept that implementing their common plan may result in the crime — the Court fails to account for hierarchical power structures in which subordinate alleged criminals, despite being aware and accepting the possibility of the crime’s realisation, do not have the ability to reject the common plan or remove themselves from the joint enterprise. In the final analysis, this paper cautions the Court that Lubanga set the threshold for liability in a joint enterprise too low and given the political difficulties in amending the Rome Statute, a more nuanced interpretation of co-perpetration in Article 25(3)(a) would avoid placing unfound liability for crimes under the Statute onto individuals marginally, or at all, guilty.
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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 | 0.011 | 0.018 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.030 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.017 | 0.011 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.010 |
| Research integrity | 0.012 | 0.015 |
| 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".