The trial of former Liberian President Charles Taylor on war crimes charges in The Hague, Netherlands, is a clear signal to despots that they can be held accountable for egregious violations of human rights.
Coloradans may follow this landmark case with special interest because a number of Centennial State residents have close connections to the trial.
The special tribunal created by agreement between the United Nations and the government of Sierra Leone was established in 2002 to prosecute those who bear the greatest responsibility for war crimes and crimes against humanity committed during Sierra Leone’s brutal civil war. With the indictment of a sitting head of state for crimes including murder, rape, sexual slavery and recruiting child soldiers, the Taylor trial is a landmark in international criminal justice. The charges are linked to Taylor’s arming and support of the Sierra Leone rebels.
Although efforts to create an international criminal court date back even prior to World War II, the Cold War halted all progress. Ethnic cleansing and horrible atrocities in the former Yugoslavia as it disintegrated and the 1994 genocide in Rwanda compelled the international community to establish ad-hoc war crimes tribunals under the authority of the UN Security Council. These were important first steps to give content to Justice Robert Jackson’s opening statement to the Nuremberg Tribunal which prosecuted Nazi leaders after World War II: “The wrongs which we seek to condemn and punish have been so calculated, so malignant, and so devastating, that civilization cannot tolerate their being ignored, because it cannot survive their being repeated.”
These war crimes tribunals have referred several cases to national courts and have indicted, tried and sentenced many high government officials from Croatia, Serbia, Bosnia and Rwanda. These efforts have culminated in the creation of a permanent International Criminal Court, functioning in The Hague since 2002 and now with 104 members. The court already has indicted several alleged perpetrators involved in the Darfur tragedy and in the Ugandan and Central African Republic conflicts. Jurisdiction of the court is only prospective, so Taylor’s case is being tried by a special tribunal.
Opponents have criticized the ad-hoc tribunals as expensive, slow, inefficient and ineffectual. This criticism has some merit, but perhaps it ignores the stark reality of the international system, in which nations jealously guard their sovereignty, the cases are massive, and resources are limited.
Take for instance the case of Rodney King. A 45-second criminal episode took six weeks of a very expensive trial. Contrast that with the case of Slobodan Milosevic. Although it took several years of protracted proceedings in The Hague before Milosevic died, it involved an entire country and more than 10 years of ongoing atrocities, with thousands of individual actors and victims.
These tribunals are creating an important emerging principle: no matter how high the status or position of those who plan genocide and such other heinous crimes, they must not go unpunished even if they do not directly commit those atrocities.
Several Coloradans have worked on prosecution or defense teams with the war crimes tribunals. One former prosecutor at both tribunals, David Akerson, is currently leading a team of 40 University of Denver law students and a few students from the Florida State University and University of Colorado law schools to work on actual genocide cases before these tribunals. They are helping judges as well as lawyers in The Hague and in Arusha at the Rwanda tribunal. In just one such case, the students have put in 2,500 hours of unpaid professional time.
Akerson reflects, “If nations are unwilling or unable to prevent heinous international crimes, they should at least create mechanisms to punish them. These ad-hoc tribunals and now the International Criminal Court are such mechanisms.”
Ved P. Nanda (vnanda@law.du.edu) is John Evans University Professor and director of the International Legal Studies Program, University of Denver.
