THE SPECIAL COURT FOR SIERRA LEONE AND THE SPECIAL TRIBUNAL FOR LEBANON: LESSONS TO BE LEARNED FROM THE ESTABLISHMENT, COMPOSITION AND JURISDICTION OF AN INTERNATIONAL TRIBUNAL

Because of many obstacles which had hindered the establishment of the Special Tribunal for Lebanon (STL), the UN and the Lebanese Government decided during the preparations for this institution that this tribunal would be modeled on one of the pre-existing internationalized criminal tribunals, namely, the Special Court for Sierra Leone (SCSL). This article examines this decision by using a comparative approach to briefly analyze the theory of the SCSL and that of the STL in the establishment of the tribunals, their structure and their subject matter jurisdiction in order to identify any lessons that the STL may have learned from the SCSL. Overall, the differences between the two tribunals outnumber the similarities with respect to these three key issues. However, the few resemblances between the theories of the two tribunals in these three areas constituted the only messages that the STL received from the SCSL. The variations of the two tribunals in these three areas have comprised either innovations by the tribunal that contributed to the development of the internationalized criminal tribunal system or these variations have only constituted deficiencies in the tribunal legal system.