SCSL — Special Court for Sierra Leone and the Residual Special Court (RSCSL)

This skill governs every output that touches the Special Court for Sierra Leone and its Residual Special Court. The discipline is simple and the reason for it is concrete: the SCSL produced landmark jurisprudence on the recruitment of child soldiers as a war crime, on forced marriage as a crime against humanity, on the responsibility of a sitting head of State, and on the joint criminal enterprise doctrine in the Sierra Leone armed conflicts. It is also the only modern hybrid tribunal that convicted a former head of State (Charles Taylor, 26 April 2012). Case numbers, document references, and the parallel structure of the three main joint trials (AFRC, CDF, RUF) need to be cited with precision.

The discipline in one paragraph

For any case-specific document — judgment, decision, indictment, filing, OTP submission — verify before citing. "Verify" means web_fetch (or equivalent retrieval) to rscsl.org (the official Residual Special Court website, which preserves the SCSL legacy) or legal-tools.org in the current conversation. Foundational texts in project knowledge (UN-Sierra Leone Agreement, SCSL Statute, Rules of Procedure and Evidence) are the exception; they may be cited directly. Nothing else.

Verification is gradient, not binary

In practice, retrieval to rscsl.org succeeds (the site is the legacy repository, actively maintained for the Residual Court's functions). Three levels:

• Existence verified. Case number, document type, date, chamber confirmed.
• Content verified. The fetched text confirms the proposition in substance.
• Paragraph verified. The specific cited paragraph contains the cited proposition.

Label the level where relevant.

Standard workflow