Every weekend in post-war Freetown, members of the international community head out to the fine sandy beaches on the former colony's peninsula at Lakkah, Tokeh and River Number Two. On the way they often stop off to eat fish and lobster at Franco's, an excellent Italian restaurant by the sea. Dotted along the rutted, pot-holed road to these destinations are muscle-bound men, many of them ex-combatants, breaking boulders into piles of gravel with pick-axes, newly built houses clinging to denuded hillsides, decomposing car-wrecks, and small children demanding money at roadblocks made from pieces of string. One often also sees Mercedes Benz vehicles, some antique, some the latest European model, weaving slowly down the road, painstakingly trying to not scrape the red dirt with their low-slung chassis. These prestigious cars are rapidly overtaken, meanwhile, by shiny four-wheel-drive Land Cruisers and Pajeros, and also by podapodas – local minibuses crammed with passengers, that, in spite of their decrepit appearance, bounce past with insouciant speed. I will argue in this book that the Special Court for Sierra Leone was a bit like one of these Mercedes: in many respects a fine vehicle, but not well adapted to the local terrain. Its laws, legal doctrines and truth-finding procedures all lacked traction with local cultural realities, leading to difficult trials and, in some cases, serious questions over the quality of the convictions of the accused. I will argue that the experience of the Special Court holds important lessons for the way international courts should proceed when trying complex crimes in unfamiliar cultures, and that the international justice community needs genuinely hybrid solutions, somewhere between the all-terrain vehicle and the local minibus, if it is to achieve its intended aims.