According to news reports (BBC, VOA, Reuters) Liberian President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf has formally requested that Nigeria extradite former Liberian President Charles Taylor to the Special Court for Sierra Leone, a hybrid tribunal set up through an agreement between the United Nations and the government of Sierra Leone. A spokesman for Nigerian President Olesegun Obasanjo has confirmed the request and stated that President Obasanjo will consult with the heads of the African Union and the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) regarding the request. The Prosecutor of the Special Court has publicly welcomed the request.
Taylor has been indicted by the Special Court for supporting the Revolutionary United Front (RUF), the Sierra Leonean rebel group best known for its brutal practice of amputating the limbs of those victims whom it spared from murder, in order that Taylor could gain access to Sierra Leone's mineral wealth and enhance his own regional power and influence. In 2003, Nigeria granted him asylum as part of a deal to end Liberia's decades of civil war.
Although the ICTY and ICTR, which were created by the Security Council under Chapter VII of the UN Charter, have the power to order cooperation with their prosecutions (under Article 29 of the ICTY Statute and Article 28 of the ICTR Statute) the Special Court could not order Nigeria to turn over Taylor to its custody for trial. Nigeria, for its part, has always said that it would only return him from his asylum there upon the request of a democratically-elected leader of Liberia. Johnson-Sirleaf, though she previously stated that Taylor's prosecution was of secondary concern to the reconstruction of war-ravaged Liberia, appears to have made just such a request.
Kudos to President Johnson-Sirleaf for recognizing that prosecutions and truth commissions both serve necessary, distinct, and complementary functions in a strategy for transitional justice. With another war criminal head of state headed for the dock, the slow, steady march of international criminal justice plods onward.
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