The Continued Relevance of the Contributions of the Sierra Leone Tribunal to International Criminal Law

Abstract

This paper introduces a special symposium issue of the Florida International University Law Review (Volume 15, No. 1, 2021) dedicated to the book The Legal Legacy of the Special Court for Sierra Leone, published by Cambridge University Press, July 2020. The symposium brought together leading scholars and practitioners of international criminal law, invited by the law review editors, to comment on the book. This introduction by the author briefly summarizes the contents of the book, highlighting the salient aspects of the Special Court for Sierra Leone’s jurisprudential legacy for international criminal law that it covers on key topics such as immunity of state officials from prosecution for international crimes, the legality of blanket amnesties for international crimes, the first prosecution of the war crime of child recruitment, the first prosecution of the crime of forced marriage as a crime against humanity, and the relationship between special criminal courts and truth and reconciliation commissions in the first post-conflict situation to experiment with both types of mechanisms.