By Tara Pistorese
Impunity Watch Reporter, Africa
MONROVIA, Liberia—Charles Taylor and his defense team are appealing the April conviction and fifty-year sentence Taylor received from The Hague for war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Taylor, 64, was arrested in March 2006 and found guilty in April of this year for aiding and abetting what the International Court termed “some of the most heinous crimes in human history.”
Finding Taylor guilty of eleven counts of arming rebels with blood diamonds, the Court determined that Taylor had been paid in diamonds mined in areas under the control of Sierra Leone’s Revolutionary United Front rebels.
The rebels were responsible for murdering, raping, and mutilating their victims, forcing children to fight, and keeping sex slaves during the war with Sierra Leone that claimed approximately 120,000 lives.
Taylor’s sentence was the first to be committed by the International Court since the Nuremberg Nazi trials in 1946.
According to Taylor’s defense team, the former Liberian President will be appealing because the Court made “systematic errors” in evaluating evidence, and relied on “uncorporated” hearsay as the sole basis for specific incriminating findings of fact.
“Charles Taylor respectfully requests that the appeals chamber reverse all the findings of guilty and [the] conviction entered against him and vacate the judgment,” Taylor’s defense counsel announced.
Similarly, the prosecution plans to appeal the Special Court’s decision to acquit Taylor of more serious charges. Prosecutors will also call on the Court to extend Taylor’s sentence to the originally requested eighty-year term.
Two separate bills were recently introduced in the Liberian House of Representatives seeking to establish a war crimes court there. However, Senior Senator and Taylor’s ex-wife Jewell Howard-Taylor has publicly opposed the bills.
“Given the level of sufferings our people faced during the terrible days of wars and even now, I think the best option is not establishing war crimes court, but the creation of employment opportunities where Liberians can [fend] for themselves,” Senator Taylor said.
“My position is clear, I am not supporting the culture of impunity, but war crimes court at this time is not healthy for [our] democracy.”
For further information, please see:
AFP—Liberia’s Taylor Appeals War Crime Conviction—19 July 2012
AllAfrica—Liberia: Sen. Taylor-Rejects War Crimes Court—19 July 2012
Deutsche Welle—Liberia’s Charles Taylor Appeals War Crimes Conviction—19 July 2012
NineMSN—Taylor Appeals War Crimes Conviction—20 July 2012
