ABSTRACT
The hybrid criminal tribunals discussed in this chapter present themselves as unusual institutional experiments that take different forms. It was hoped that these tribunals, which have been established inter alia in Sierra Leone, Cambodia, Kosovo, Timor Leste, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Lebanon from the early 2000s onwards, would deliver international criminal justice more effectively, and with a smaller price tag, than the ad hoc tribunals. The chapter considers some of the lessons learnt from the hybrid tribunals that have already been established, but it argues that we should try to resist the common impulse to draw any final conclusions on these experiments. Based on an assessment in 2006, a commentator argued that it was a mixed bench of international and local judges that stands out as 'the only defining common feature of the current hybrid courts'. Hybrid tribunals have already demonstrated that, with some creativity, new paths may be taken with respect to the institutional enforcement of international criminal law.
