The Uncertain Relationship between International Criminal Law Accountability and the Rule of Law in Post-Atrocity States: Lessons from Cambodia
Bibliographic record
Abstract
One of the goals routinely ascribed to international criminal law (“ICL”) prosecutions is the ability to improve the rule of law domestically in post-atrocity states. This Article reassesses the common assumption that the relationship between the pursuit of ICL accountability and improving the rule of law in post-atrocity states is necessarily a linear, wholly positive one. It does so through an analysis of the relationship between the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia and the rule of law domestically in Cambodia. Through this analysis, this Article highlights the oft-ignored possibility that ICL prosecutions may actually have a mix of positive, nil, and negative effects on the domestic rule of law, at least in the short run. In the Cambodian context, this Article argues that such risk is quite real and arguably, in the process of being realized. These harmful rule of law consequences are most visible when viewed in light of the particularities of Cambodia’s rule of law deficit, which increasingly stems from government practices of subverting the rule of law through means obscured behind facades of legality. The ECCC’s tacit toleration of the Cambodian government’s apparent interference with the Court’s work risks legitimating the notion that the rule of law is mere window dressing, rather than anything of substance in even the most basic, procedural sense.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
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".