Charles Taylor sentenced to fifty years

Charles Taylor, 64yrs the first former head of state to be convicted of war crimes since World War II was sentenced to 50 years in prison yesterday by an international court in The Hague, Netherlands. Taylor is due to serve his sentence at a high security prison in Britain. There is no death penalty in international criminal law. The six years he spent detained during the trial will count against his term. Meanwhile, he is appealing his conviction. Dressed in a blue suit and yellow tie, Taylor sat impassively through the roughly 45-minute sentencing.

Hands clasped in front of his mouth and brow furrowed, Taylor shifted uneasily when the camera broadcasting proceedings settled on him. Taylor directed his gaze downward while Presiding Judge Richard Lussick read the sentencing statement, which began with a horror cabinet of carnage committed in Sierra Leone by rebels from the Revolutionary United Front, which the former president backed.

“The accused has been found responsible for aiding and abetting as well as planning some of the most heinous and brutal crimes recorded in human history,” said Lussick, who described one RUF military operation as the “indiscriminate killing of anything that moved.”
He spoke of amputations with machetes, some carried out by child soldiers forced to do so and read accounts by witnesses who suffered under the violence. Although shorter than the 80 years that prosecutors had sought, the sentence set a precedent for an international justice system aimed at deterring future war crimes. The court rejected defense appeals for leniency.

“It is really significant that Taylor’s status as a former head of state was taken as an aggravating factor as far as his sentence was concerned,” said Geraldine Mattioli-Zeltner of Human Rights Watch. “That is a very important precedent and I hope that Syria’s Bashar al-Assad and Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir take note.”

Taylor has been on trial at the special court for Sierra Leone since 2006 on 11 charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity, including murder, rape, pillage and the conscription of child soldiers. In an 11-year war that ended in 2002, Sierra Leone’s Revolutionary United Front rebels murdered, raped and mutilated their way across Liberia’s neighbor, helped by Taylor as he profited from a trade in so-called blood diamonds.

The Special Court for Sierra Leone convicted former Liberian president Charles Taylor last month of supplying and encouraging rebels in neighboring Sierra Leone in a campaign of terror, involving murder, rape, sexual slavery and the conscription children younger than 15.

He was also found guilty of using Sierra Leone’s diamond deposits to help fuel its civil war with arms and guns while enriching himself with what have commonly come to be known as “blood diamonds.” “Witness TF1064 was forced to carry a bag containing human heads,” Lussick said. “On the way, the rebels ordered her to laugh as she carried the bags dripping with blood.” Upon arrival, “the bag was emptied, and she saw the heads of her children.”

A former child soldier, conscripted at age 12, in his testimony told of “having the letters RUF carved into his chest,” Lussick said. “When ordered on a food-finding mission to rape an old woman they found at a farmhouse, the boy cried and refused, for which he was punished.”

The prosecution had asked the Special Court for Sierra Leone to sentence Taylor, who was president of Liberia from 1997 to 2003, to 80 years behind bars, but the judges found the recommendation “excessive,” citing the “limited scope” of the conviction in key attacks.

The prosecutors had failed to prove that Taylor assumed direct command over rebels who committed atrocities. The atrocities he was convicted of supporting occurred over the course of five years almost his entire presidency and reached a peak in 1998 and 1999. Sierra Leone’s civil war lasted from 1991 to 2002, ultimately leaving 50,000 dead or missing.

Although Taylor was not on the battlefield in Sierra Leone, the court saw his position of power as president of the neighboring country and the use of his own military’s capabilities to stoke up RUF rebels as making him directly responsible for the bloodshed he encouraged.

His defense attorneys pointed to the former Liberian president’s role in the peace process that ended the civil war as a mitigating factor in his sentencing. But after lengthy consideration, the panel of judges which in addition to Lassick included Judge Teresa Doherty and Judge Julia Sebutinde did not buy it.

The United Nations and the Sierra Leone government jointly set up the special tribunal to try those who played the biggest role in the atrocities. The court was moved to the Netherlands from Sierra Leone, where emotions about the civil war still run high.
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