Explores how the first treaty-based UN international tribunal's judges innovatively applied the law to perpetrators of international crimes in one of the worst conflicts in recent history.

This important book considers whether the Special Court for Sierra Leone (SCSL), which was established jointly through an unprecedented bilateral treaty between the United Nations (UN) and Sierra Leone in 2002, has made jurisprudential contributions to the development of the nascent and still unsettled field of international criminal law. A leading authority on the application of international criminal justice in Africa, Charles Jalloh argues that the SCSL, as an innovative hybrid international penal tribunal, made useful jurisprudential additions on key legal questions concerning greatest responsibility jurisdiction, the war crime of child recruitment, forced marriage as a crime against humanity, amnesty, immunity and the relationship between truth commissions and criminal courts. He demonstrates that some of the SCSL case law broke new ground, and in so doing, bequeathed a 'legal legacy' that remains vital to the ongoing global fight against impunity for atrocity crimes and to the continued development of modern international criminal law.

The Special Court for Sierra Leone (SCSL) is the third modern international criminal tribunal supported by the United Nations and the first to be situated where the crimes were committed. This timely, important and comprehensive book is the first to critically assess the impact and legacy of the SCSL for Africa and international criminal law. Contributors include leading scholars and respected practitioners with inside knowledge of the tribunal, who analyze cutting-edge and controversial issues with significant implications for international criminal law and transitional justice. These include joint criminal enterprise; forced marriage; enlisting and using child soldiers; attacks against United Nations peacekeepers; the tension between truth commissions and criminal trials in the first country to simultaneously have the two; and the questions of whether it is permissible under international law for states to unilaterally confer blanket amnesties to local perpetrators of universally condemned international crimes.