Justice for Charles Taylor

Can this war-crimes court finally get it right?

from the July 5, 2007 edition

JOHN OVERMYER

Page 1 of 2

Charlottesville, Va. - How effective are war-crimes courts at demonstrating that no one, regardless of his position, is above the law? Many rights activists had hoped that – after their disappointment with the trials of Yugoslavia's Slobodan Milosevic and Iraq's Saddam Hussein – the trial of former Liberian President Charles Taylor, under way in The Hague, could finally send the "right" deterrent message to other potentially abusive national leaders.

If this does happen (and I have some doubts), then it won't be happening anytime soon. On Monday, judges at the Special Court for Sierra Leone (SCSL), which is trying Mr. Taylor on 11 counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity, confirmed that they've postponed the trial until Aug. 20. Taylor had previously sacked one lawyer the court had assigned to him. He wanted to defend himself, just as Mr. Milosevic did. But the SCSL judges clearly feared he would imitate the time-wasting and grandstanding that Milosevic engaged in before he died. So they've assigned Taylor new lawyers and have given them several weeks to prepare. (It's still unclear whether Taylor will cooperate with them.)

Like all criminal defendants, Taylor should be considered innocent until he is proven guilty. But there is much strong evidence against him. In 1989, he launched an armed uprising in his native Liberia and he soon emerged as a powerful and brutal participant in the civil war that then laid waste to the country. In 1996, the civil war officially ended, and, in the presidential election held in 1997, Taylor won a strong victory. Even after he became president, he continued to act like a warlord, abusing the citizenry and selling vast amounts of Liberia's natural resources for personal gain. (US evangelist Pat Robertson was one close business partner.)

Taylor also gave allegedly strong support to participants in the civil war roiling neighboring Sierra Leone. It was for those acts that the SCSL indicted him. In July 2003, President Bush started calling openly for his ouster. That August, the Nigerian president offered Taylor a safe haven there – provided he agree to stay out of Liberian politics. Taylor took up the offer. Then, in 2006, just before Mr. Bush visited Nigeria, the Nigerian authorities arrested Taylor, and the UN took him for trial at the SCSL.

The SCSL is a joint project of the UN and the Sierra Leonean government, located in Sierra Leone. However, the Sierra Leoneans feared that Taylor's trial might seriously destabilize the country's still-fragile politics. So, unlike the court's 10 other cases, this one was moved to the underutilized courtrooms of the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague.

Page 1 | 2 | Next Page