A Tribunal of International Character
On 14 February 2005, a car bomb detonated in the heart of Beirut. Its target was the former prime minister of Lebanon, Rafik Hariri, who had remained a highly influential figure in his nation. Hariri was killed, along with more than 20 others. More than 200 people were grievously wounded. An investigative team from the United Nations determined that justice would best be served if an international, impartial body prosecuted the perpetrators.
With the consent of the Lebanese government, the United Nations Security Council thereafter passed Resolution 1757 in 2007, establishing the Special Tribunal for Lebanon, a “tribunal of international character,” a court applying Lebanese law to the highest international standards. Based in the Netherlands, the Tribunal would become an innovator in international justice. It became the first international court to prosecute terrorism as a crime, the first to establish an office solely concerned with representing the best interests of the victims, and the first to prosecute people in absentia since the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg in 1945. Unusually for a court, the Tribunal built an impressive public education and outreach service. This included making almost all of its records available to the public through its website. The records were available in English, French, and Arabic, permitting their reading both within and beyond Lebanon.
Records at Risk
In 2023, however, the Tribunal’s funding was cut off. With just a few months' warning, the Tribunal was compelled to close. The records were transferred to the United Nations Archives and Records Management Section, which had neither the capacity to keep the records public, nor the ability to make them public in the future. The court website, which held digital copies of the public records, was due to shut down, depriving the public - and the Lebanese people - of access to the Tribunal’s legacy.
To rescue the digital records and keep them accessible, the Tribunal approached Stanford University. The university’s Virtual Tribunals initiative specializes in finding, digitizing, and displaying court records. With a team combining librarians, lawyers, historians, and technologists, Virtual Tribunals already displays the court records of the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, Holocaust trials from Europe, World War II war crimes trials from across the Asia-Pacific region, and modern international criminal justice trials. It was the ideal platform for the Tribunal’s digital records, particularly since Virtual Tribunals is actively seeking to expand its holdings of present-day international justice records.
Working Fast, Working Accurately
The records had to be rescued on a tight - and immoveable - timeline. The Virtual Tribunals team learned in mid-October 2023 that the Tribunal’s website would be shut down on 31 December 2023. Critical components of the collection would have to be acquired before then. This meant capturing both the website in its archived form and the Tribunal’s YouTube channel videos and metadata. The Tribunal’s archivist, Pauline van Kersen, sent through more than 15,000 files in batches from November 2023 to October 2024, using secure cloud services for the transfers.
It soon became clear that in order for the individual files to be incorporated for maximal discovery via faceted browsing and item-level description, it would take two years to prepare the collection for final display on the Virtual Tribunals website. The team decided to select the 64 most historically and legally significant files and debut them ahead of the rest. This portion of the collection was released to the public in June 2024. The team then settled down to diligently prepare the bulk of the corpus.
Several complex technical steps had to be taken to convert the Tribunals files for the Virtual Tribunals website and digital preservation. Once files were delivered, they had to be accessioned alongside metadata into the Stanford Digital Repository (SDR). This included mapping of equivalent metadata via a crosswalk from data sources received, such as spreadsheet exports from the Tribunal’s database to Cocina (Stanford’s in-house SDR metadata schema), and display on the Spotlight platform. To achieve this, Virtual Tribunals called on Stanford’s rich human capital. Ed Summers, Laura Wrubel, and Peter Chan rendered tremendous assistance to the core Virtual Tribunals team in the archived website capture work. The aid went beyond Stanford, though. Sebastian Themelis, a University of Washington MLIS student was brought on as an intern and played an important role in the metadata work.
On 27 August 2025, the Virtual Tribunals team stood before the annual Society of American Archivists conference in Anaheim, California, and announced the release of all 15,000 files and the completion of the project. Danielle Gensch, Lauren Sorensen, and Michael Eastman were joined remotely by Pauline van Kersen for a presentation and discussion of the history of the Tribunal and the rescue of its digital records. Van Kersen, reflecting on the work, asserted that:
“The Stanford Virtual Tribunals Project is an incredible initiative. The project team completed the huge task of preserving the legacy of the STL, making it available to the global community of researchers, practitioners, students, historians and the victims of the crimes tried at the STL. In a relatively short time, the team managed to analyse the records and information of the Tribunal. It added valuable additional metadata, tags and summaries to the collection making it easily accessible and searchable.”
A Permanent Record of Rights
Complete with Stanford-created finding guides and narrative histories, as well as the Tribunal’s photographs and film, the Special Tribunal for Lebanon collection is the largest on the Virtual Tribunal’s website. Its preservation ensures a both continuing record of Lebanese history and a fascinating snapshot of international justice. Seeing the finished collection, Marian Kashou, the Tribunal’s registrar, thanked Stanford for “believing in preserving the legacy of the STL and for your diligent work to produce this outstanding virtual library.” Pauline van Kersen agreed, concluding that:
“The Stanford Virtual Tribunals project is a valuable resource that promotes transparency, supports judicial historical inquiry, and ensures that the legacies of international courts and tribunals remain available for generations to come. I am grateful for the truly amazing work they have done with respect to STL’s collection.”
In a larger sense, the addition of such an important and complex set of modern international justice records furthers one of the key purposes of Virtual Tribunals. The creation of law is forever an exercise in understanding the past and predicting the future. By placing the records of the Special Tribunal for Lebanon alongside other records from past and present, the arc of legal development - and legal future - becomes clearer.