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27 Law Context: A Socio-Legal J. 132 (2009)
Insufficiently Hybrid: Assessing the Special Court for Sierra Leone

handle is hein.journals/lwincntx27 and id is 140 raw text is: Insufficiently Hybrid: Assessing the Special Court for Sierra Leone Tim Kelsall Although there seems to be an emerging consensus in international circles that the Special Court for Sierra Leone has been a relative success story, this article queries that view. It details a number of political, institutional, and cultural ways in which the Court failed adequately to adjust to local context. Its political legitimacy was attenuated as soon as it prosecuted members of a popular local militia; its investigations team made routine blunders, the Outreach effort was too little too late, it alienated members of the local legal profession; it failed to get the best out of witnesses at trial, imposed alien laws on a local population, and applied legal doctrines ill-fitted to the nature of local social reality. For all these reasons, the Court's operation was severely compromised, suggesting that the hybrid model deserves a serious rethink. In spite of ongoing controversy in Sierra Leone, a long stream of fault- finding monitoring reports (for example Staggs and Kendall, 2004; Staggs and Kendall, 2005; Van Tuyl, 2008), and several critical publications (eg Dougherty, 2004; Cockayne, 2005; Kelsall, 2006b), there appears to be an emerging consensus in international criminal justice circles that the Special Court for Sierra Leone (SCSL) was something of a success story. While the Court doubtless represented progress when compared to ICJ debacles such as the East Timorese Special Panels, it was still beset by problems. The article aims to demonstrate this point by providing an overview of some of the political, institutional and cultural ways in which the Court failed adequately to adjust to the context in which it found itself. The backstory to the Special Court is a dreadful civil war, of dizzying complexity, that wracked Sierra Leone between 1991 and 2002. During this conflict thousands of individuals, most of them civilians, were murdered or maimed at the hands of a variety of armed factions. First the country was invaded to the east by a small group of Liberian-backed rebels called the Revolutionary United Front (RUF). Then a military coup swept away the inept and corrupt single party government. Not long after, government soldiers began collaborating with rebels to abuse the civilian population, the regime in Freetown surviving only with the help of South African mercenaries and home-grown militia units (the

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