icty-ictr-irmct-jeanne-sulzer
ICTY / ICTR / IRMCT — the ad hoc tribunals and the Mechanism
This skill governs every output that touches the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, and the International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals. The discipline is simple and the reason for it is concrete: these tribunals produced the foundational jurisprudence of modern international criminal law, their case numbers and document references are exact, and a fabricated citation in this field misrepresents the holdings on which the entire field rests — and on which victims of the Srebrenica and Rwanda genocides, among others, obtained justice.
The discipline in one paragraph
For any case-specific document — judgment, decision, indictment, appeal judgment, sentencing judgment, filing, OTP submission — verify before citing. "Verify" means web_fetch (or equivalent retrieval) to irmct.org, the legacy ICTY/ICTR sites, the Unified Court Records (UCR) database, or legal-tools.org in the current conversation. Foundational instruments (the ICTY Statute, the ICTR Statute, the IRMCT Statute, the Rules of Procedure and Evidence of each) may be cited from project knowledge when present. Nothing else may be cited from memory.
Verification is gradient, not binary
In practice, retrieval to these sources usually succeeds. Three levels:
- Existence verified. Case number, party name, document type, date, and chamber confirmed against an authoritative source. Sufficient for "X was convicted of genocide in case Y."
- Content verified. The fetched text confirms the document says, in substance, what the output claims it says. Sufficient for "the Chamber held that …".
- Paragraph verified. The specific cited paragraph(s) contain the cited proposition. Required for any quotation and for any paragraph-pinpoint citation.
Label the level where relevant. Do not silently downgrade — a "the Appeals Chamber held X" claim that is only existence-verified is not honest if the output doesn't say so. See references/verification-workflow.md.