The Prohibition on Retroactive Criminal Law in International Criminal Law
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this chapter, I trace the development of the prohibition on retroactive law in general international and international criminal law. I begin by clarifying what I mean when I refer to retroactive law, drawing from the views of a number of scholars. I then engage in a comparative-historical analysis to demonstrate that prior to the Judgment of the International Military Tribunal in 1946, the prohibition on retroactive criminal law did not exist in international law. From there, I move to examine the development of the prohibition following the International Military Tribunal’s acceptance that it was a principle of justice in the international legal order. I engage in a comparative examination of the way international and regional courts and tribunals have articulated the prohibition. From that, I clarify the current content of the prohibition in customary international law. I critique international practice for stating the prohibition in absolute terms while permitting exceptions. Drawing from that practice, I articulate the two exceptions to the prohibition on retroactive criminal law which are de facto accepted. I argue that these exceptions are justifiable, and that their use should be openly defended, in a fair legal system.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| 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 teacher head, 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".