Criminal justice for human rights abuses committed during periods of political repression or dictatorship is one of the great challenges to post-con?ict societies. In many cases, there has been no justice at all. Sometimes serious political concerns that e?orts at accountability might upset fragile peace settlements have militated in favour of no action and no accountability. In many cases, the outgoing tyrants have conditioned their departure upon a pledge that there be no prosecutions. But thinking on these issues has evolved considerably in recent years. Largely driven by the view that collective amnesia amounts to a violation of fundamental human rights, especially those of the victims of atrocities, attention has increasingly turned to the dynamics of post-con?ict accountability. At the high end of the range, of course, sit the new international criminal justice institutions: the ad hoc tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, the Special Court for Sierra Leone, the various ‘‘hybrid’’ tribunals in Kosovo, East Timor and Cambodia, and the new International Criminal Court. But in terms of sheer numbers, the most signi?cant new institutions are truth and reconciliation commissions. Of va- able architecture, depending upon the prerogatives of the society in question and the features of the past con?ict, they have emerged as a highly popular mechanism within the toolbox of transitional justice. In some cases, the truth commission is held out as an alternative to criminal justice.

This major study examines the successes and failures of the full transitional justice programme in Sierra Leone. It sets out the implications of the Sierra Leonean experience for other post-conflict situations and for the broader project of evaluating transitional justice.

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.

The establishment of a truth and reconciliation commission (TRC) and a war crimes court (the Special Court for Sierra Leone or SCSL) in Sierra Leone has been described as a transitional justice (TJ) model that advances both justice and reconciliation. Whether these institutions have been a 'success' has been highly contested within Sierra Leone and among external TJ observers. This chapter focuses on the politics informing the most prominent process in Sierra Leone: the Special Court. The chapter claims that the independence or otherwise of SCSL case selection is a key indicator of success. It considers the interests of the actors who designed the Court and traces the manifestation of those interests in key elements of institutional design and function. Its findings support a more realist explanation of the Court's creation and function than the normative aspirations espoused by the Court and repeated by other observers 'that no one was beyond the court's reach'. I argue that the politics of the Court's creation compromised its capacity to independently pursue its mandate - to pursue those most responsible for crimes. This was a Court, I argue, designed to assist other US and British instruments of regime change strategy in Liberia and regime protection in Sierra Leone. The chapter draws on over 150 interviews with personnel from the Special Court, the United States Department of Defense, the United States Department of State, from Congress, from the United Nations Secretariat, with Human Rights Groups, with personnel Sierra Leonean Civil Society and with members of the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office, as well as experience working at the Sierra Leone Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 2003 and at the Special Court for Sierra Leone in 2008.