I wrote in the preface to this book that the Special Court was rather like a Mercedes Benz, crawling at a pitiful pace along Sierra Leone's potholed roads: prestigious, maybe, but ill-adapted to the local terrain. Pushing the analogy further, we could be forgiven for thinking that in the case of the CDF, it was so ill-suited that one of the defendants was taken to the wrong place, while another got locked in the vehicle through little fault of his own. In the subsequent chapters, I have tried to show that this was because the legal doctrine of superior responsibility was unsuited to the realities of Sierra Leonean social and military organisation; I have argued that Western legal precepts and procedures were unsuited to judging adequately the actions of a man whose power stemmed from occult beliefs; I have suggested that crimes such as forced marriage and enlisting children for military service were inappropriate to the Sierra Leonean cultural context; and I have pointed to a range of difficulties that the encounter of two unfamiliar cultures created for the task of assessing witness credibility. In this, the book's conclusion, I suggest some ways in which this situation might be repaired. I will begin by discussing some practical reforms, then some ethical issues, then some epistemological quandaries, before finally advocating a more pluralistic justice approach.

PRACTICAL REFORMS

I argued in Chapter 6 that the quality of evidence elicited at the Special Court was generally poor. This was for a variety of reasons.