Former Liberian President Likely to Face War Crimes Trial in The Hague

By Anthony Dworkin

Charles Taylor, the former president of Liberia who was arrested in Nigeria on Wednesday March 29 to face war crimes charges brought by the Sierra Leone special tribunal, seems likely to be tried in The Hague rather than in Sierra Leone.  The Sierra Leone war crimes court, which normally sits in the country’s capital Freetown, has asked that it be allowed to hold Taylor’s trial in special session in the Netherlands in order to avoid the risk of provoking disturbances in West Africa.  The current Liberian president Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, whose request to Nigeria to hand over Taylor led to his delivery to the court, has backed the move.

Taylor is the first African head of state to face trial before an internationally-backed court for war crimes or crimes against humanity.  He is charged with offences including unlawful killings, terrorizing the civilian population, sexual violence and mutilation.  The prosecution claims that before and during his time as leader of Liberia he sponsored and armed the Revolutionary United Front rebel group in the brutal civil war in neighbouring Sierra Leone in exchange for access to the country’s diamonds.   

The Sierra Leone Special Court is a hybrid domestic-international court, with a majority of judges from overseas and a minority from Sierra Leone.  It was set up in 2002 and has active indictments against eleven people, of whom nine are currently on trial (two other indictees died before they could be brought to the dock).  Charges against Taylor were unveiled in the summer of 2003, at a time when his regime was facing defeat by rebel forces in Liberia’s own civil war.  To avoid a bloody battle in Liberia’s capital city Monrovia, a deal was negotiated whereby Taylor left the country and received asylum in Nigeria. 

The Nigerian government under President Olusegun Obasanjo promised that it would not hand Taylor over to the Sierra Leone tribunal unless it requested to do so by a democratically elected government in Liberia.  Newly-elected Liberian President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, who took office at the beginning of this year, formally requested Taylor’s transfer two weeks ago.  Following her inauguration, Johnson-Sirleaf had said that her priority would be dealing with reconstruction and development, rather than Taylor’s fate.  There have been suggestions that her change of mind on this politically-charged question followed pressure from the United States, but Johnson-Sirleaf said today that “in the end I had no option but to accept the responsibility of leadership by taking a hard decision which ensured the long-term safety of the Liberian people and the security of the nation.” 

By holding the trial outside West Africa, the Sierra Leone Special Court apparently hopes to avoid the risk that a group of Taylor’s followers might use his appearance in court to mobilize and cause further instability in Sierra Leone or Liberia. 

The court also announced that it had reduced the number of counts in Taylor’s indictment from 17 to 11 in order to ensure “a more focused trial.”  It is possible that the prosecution’s decision reflected the experience of the Milosevic trial, where prosecutors were criticized for producing an expansive set of charges that led to a drawn-out trial.  As in the Milosevic case, too, the trial will attempt to assign responsibility to a political leader who was not militarily in command  of the forces that committed crimes, but allegedly involved in a common plan or joint enterprise through the support he provided.

Related Chapters from Crimes of War: What the Public Should Know

Crimes Against Humanity
Genocide
Liberia
War Crimes, Categories of

Related Links:

Special Court for Sierra Leone

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