War Crimes Prosecution in Australia and Other Common Law Countries: Some Observations
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The purpose of this article is to consider the approach to prosecuting war crimes in a handful of common law countries. Of particular focus will be the Australian experience. For a country far removed from conflict itself, Australia has an unusually rich – and imperfect – history of investigating and prosecuting war criminals, beginning with the prosecution of more than 800 Japanese defendants immediately following the Second World War and continuing to this day with extradition battles for the last living Nazi perpetrators hiding in this country and the realisation that Australia is home to hundreds (possibly thousands) of war criminals who have emigrated from an array of different conflicts. The United Kingdom and Canada have also had considerable experience coming to terms with the presence of war criminals on their territory and they have enacted legislation and pursued prosecutions with mixed results. This article will consider some of these experiences, and will ultimately draw some lessons in policy and practice concerning the pursuit of domestic war crimes trials. Australia, United Kingdom and Canada have been selected for several reasons. First, they are all common law countries with Commonwealth legal heritage, like Bangladesh. Secondly, they are all signatories to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, which raises policy issues relating to the system of complementarity (particularly the acceptance by signatories to the Statute that they are the source of primary jurisdiction for war crimes prosecutions). Finally, this is a brief article and these countries share a sufficiently similar experience of these issues to provide a compact comparative study.
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 | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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; 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".