Bibliographic record
Abstract
Contemporary large-scale, ad hoc United Nations Commissions of Inquiry (UN COIs) are the biggest, best resourced, most important international fact-finding bodies in existence today. They tend to focus on international criminal and human rights law, humanitarian law, and more broadly on the field of transitional justice. These contemporary UN COIs have most often been promulgated in recent years by the UN Human Rights Council, but also by the UN Secretary-General and even the Security Council. They are now routinely relied upon as the UN’s first line of response to the world’s biggest and most intractable conflicts, including in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC Mapping Exercise), Syria, Guinea, Gaza (alternatively called the Goldstone COI), Darfur (Sudan), Rwanda and elsewhere. Though each UN COI has its own peculiarities there also tends to be a great deal of uniformity in terms of what type of situation they respond to—armed conflict in particular, where mass abuses or serious international crimes are suspected. As a mechanism for identifying a road-map to structural reform of legal, political and other public institutions, COIs have demonstrated both in domestic cases and internationally that they can be very useful. This paper will proceed first by briefly introducing large-scale UN COIs and the benefits that they are thought to offer today. Second, it will discuss sequentially the two most prevalent purposes for which ad hoc UN COIs operate—as quasi-criminal investigations and as robust transitional justice investigations—and conclude that both options represent purposes for which formal, large-scale UN COIs are not ideally suited. All of this analysis will be informed by looking at some recent UN war crimes COIs and will also draw from the experience of some domestic examples, particularly Canada’s lengthy experience with domestic COIs. The result leaves the future of large-scale ad hoc UN COIs up in the air, as the goals for which most contemporary UN COIs are now constituted are seen to inapposite to the structure of the COI process. But this does not mean that UN COIs cannot be of great benefit to the UN, merely that how, when and why they are used requires a complete re-think.
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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 | 0.172 | 0.281 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.012 | 0.008 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.016 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.034 | 0.021 |
| Open science | 0.005 | 0.018 |
| Research integrity | 0.008 | 0.014 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.015 | 0.004 |
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".