CPS — Cour Pénale Spéciale de la République Centrafricaine

CPS — Cour Pénale Spéciale de la République Centrafricaine

This skill governs every output that touches the Cour Pénale Spéciale de la République Centrafricaine (CPS) — the Special Criminal Court in the Central African Republic. The discipline is simple and the reason for it is concrete: the CPS is the first fully hybrid court integrated into a national judicial system with jurisdiction over international crimes, and one of the only such courts operating in a country experiencing ongoing armed conflict. Its case numbers and procedural records are still developing; the Court conducts its principal work in French; and its complementarity relationship with the International Criminal Court (which has two situations in the CAR) is institutionally distinctive.

The discipline in one paragraph

For any case-specific document — judgment, decision, indictment, filing, ordonnance d'instruction, requisitoire — verify before citing. "Verify" means web_fetch (or equivalent retrieval) to cpsrca.cf (the official CPS website) in the current conversation. Foundational texts in project knowledge (Loi organique 15.003, Loi 18.010 on the RPE, Code pénal centrafricain, Loi de coopération avec la CPI) are the exception; they may be cited directly. Nothing else.

Verification is gradient, not binary

In practice, cpsrca.cf is actively maintained (the CPS is operating with regular new audiences, decisions and press releases), but direct web_fetch to it — like several CPS-related sites (JusticeInfo, HRW) — often returns a 403 or partial content. Treat that as expected and work the fallback ladder (legal-tools.org, MINUSCA, JusticeInfo, RJDH, Radio Ndeke Luka) rather than as a dead end. Three levels:

• Existence verified. Affair, 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. The CPS publishes summaries of judgments in addition to the full reasoned judgments; for substantive holdings, the arrêt motivé (full reasoned judgment) is authoritative, not the press release summary.

Standard workflow

Step 0 — Identify the document. Before anything else, distinguish:

• The affair (l'affaire Paoua / Lemouna et Koundjili; l'affaire Ndélé 1; l'affaire Ndélé 1 contumace; subsequent cases)
• The chamber — Chambre d'instruction (investigation), Chambre d'assises (trial), Chambre d'appel (appeal), Chambre de cassation (cassation, where applicable)
• The document type — Ordonnance, Réquisitoire, Acte d'accusation, Jugement de la Chambre d'assises, Arrêt de la Chambre d'appel, Décision sur les intérêts civils

Step 1 — Plan citations. List every citation that will appear and the proposition each supports.

Step 2 — Verify with the fallback ladder. cpsrca.cf → JusticeInfo.net (Tier 2, for case summaries) → MINUSCA press releases (Tier 1 for institutional cooperation matters) → FIDH / Human Rights Watch monitoring reports (Tier 2) → ask the user.

Step 3 — Draft using verified material. Use the citation format in references/citation-format.md.

Step 4 — Self-audit. Each citation must trace to project knowledge or to a successful retrieval in this conversation.

Foundational texts (cite from project knowledge when present)

• Loi organique n°15.003 du 3 juin 2015 portant création, organisation et fonctionnement de la Cour pénale spéciale (adopted by the Conseil national de transition on 22 April 2015; promulgated by interim President Catherine Samba-Panza on 3 June 2015) — the constitutive instrument. Key articles:
  • Art. 1 — Création de la CPS
  • Art. 3 — Compétence matérielle ("les violations graves des droits humains et du droit international humanitaire … notamment le crime de génocide, les crimes contre l'humanité et les crimes de guerre" committed in CAR territory since 1 January 2003). The statutory "notamment" is load-bearing — see references/foundational-texts.md on the debate over whether the list is illustrative rather than exhaustive.
  • Art. 4 — Compétence personnelle
  • Art. 5 — Compétence concurrente (with national courts; CPS has primacy)