The Special Court for Sierra Leone's Consideration of Gender-Based Violence: Contributing to Transitional Justice?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Serious gender-based crimes were committed against women and girls during Sierra Leone's decade-long armed conflict. This article examines how the Special Court for Sierra Leone has addressed - and, in some cases, has failed to address - these crimes in its first four judgments. The June 20, 2007 trial judgment in the Armed Forces Revolutionary Council case assists international criminal law's heretofore limited understanding of the crime against humanity of forced marriage, especially through the separate concurring opinion of Justice Sebutinde and the partially dissenting opinion of Justice Doherty. Unfortunately, that judgment also incorrectly subsumed evidence of forced marriage into the crime against humanity of sexual slavery, and subsequently into the war crime of outrages upon personal dignity. The February 22, 2008 appeals judgment attempts to correct these missteps, thereby adding valuable insight into the nature and legal categorization of the crime against humanity of forced marriage, but the manner in which it defines the crime raises questions about how best to conceptualize multifaceted gender-based crimes. In contrast, the August 2, 2007 trial judgment in the Civil Defence Forces case is virtually silent on gender-based crimes committed against women and girls. This omission is the result of a series of sometimes questionable majority judicial decisions prior to and during trial excluding or truncating evidence. The May 28, 2008 appeals judgment strongly rebuked, in part, the majority Trial Chamber's actions, but could not correct the overall result of the silencing. This article concludes that the four judgments, considered together, make a modest contribution to gender-sensitive transitional justice. However, these judgments also illustrate that, despite the growing recognition of gender-based crimes within international criminal law, such crimes can still be misunderstood, misinterpreted, mischaracterized or excluded during trials and in judgments. The Special Court has the opportunity to address gender-based crimes more thoughtfully and thoroughly in future judgments, in the Revolutionary United Front and Charles Taylor cases.
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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 | 0.033 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.020 | 0.011 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.018 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.020 | 0.017 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".