Some of us have known for a while that Charles Taylor was being held at HMP Frankland, as revealed on the front page of the Northern Echo tomorrow.
Ad hoc tribunals to try specific
individuals are inherently illegal. Amnesty International rightly made that
point, and did so very powerfully, in its 2003 report into the trial of the
Grenada 17.
Yet in 2007 that same organisation welcomed the trial of Charles
Taylor before just such a tribunal, and called for its proceedings to be
broadcast in Liberia for “educative” effect.
The International Criminal Court has never
publicly indicted anyone who was not an African.
Be he innocent or be he guilty, Taylor was tried, if it can be so described, and he was convicted and sentenced, by an unlawful body: a specially constituted branch of the Special Court for Sierra Leone, itself a creature, not of international treaty-making and ratification, but of executive fiat on the part of the United Nations.
Laurent Gbagbo is also now subject to such an unlawful travesty of a trial, as was Thomas Lubanga.
Be he innocent or be he guilty, Taylor was tried, if it can be so described, and he was convicted and sentenced, by an unlawful body: a specially constituted branch of the Special Court for Sierra Leone, itself a creature, not of international treaty-making and ratification, but of executive fiat on the part of the United Nations.
Laurent Gbagbo is also now subject to such an unlawful travesty of a trial, as was Thomas Lubanga.
No comments:
Post a Comment