Prosecutorial Discretion at the Special Court for Sierra Leone: A Critique
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Principle 1 of the International Law Commission demands that any person who commits an act which constitutes a crime under international law is responsible and therefore liable to punishment. This is supported by various other international treaties, obligations, and also under customary international law. The mandate of the Special Court for Sierra Leone (The Special Court) rests with United Nations Security Council Resolution 1315(2000); to prosecute those who bear the greatest responsibility for serious international crimes committed during the country’s civil war, which lasted from 1991-2002. To be clear, there were many protagonists in the conflict. However, the Special Court, which lasted between 2002 and 2012, prosecuted only thirteen members from selected groups, who were alleged to have committed such offences. Although there was considerable evidence to have supported additional prosecutions from the other warring factions in the conflict. As it was the responsibility of the Prosecutor to select those who were to be prosecuted; was the prosecutorial discretion robust enough in the case selection of those that were prosecuted, or was it a case of selective enforcement, or was it even discriminatory whilst trying to achieve the Court’s mandate? This paper aims to evaluate the exercise of prosecutorial discretion at the Special Court, with a view to determining, whether the manner in which it was exercised may have led to the Prosecutor underachieving the Court’s mandate.
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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 | 0.020 | 0.047 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.035 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.014 | 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".