Taylor’s Trial and the Tribulations of Justice

Nic Bothma/European Pressphoto AgencyAn international court on Thursday found Charles Taylor, the former president of Liberia, guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity.

On Thursday, a special panel of judges in The Hague found Charles Taylor, the former president of Liberia, guilty of aiding war crimes in Sierra Leone. Hailed by some as a victory against impunity, the historic verdict is also raising concerns about international criminal justice.

The Taylor trial came under fire for taking almost five years and costing some $250 million, according to The Guardian. “Such glacial progress is not only vastly expensive,” notes an editorial in The Independent. “It also hardly instills the necessary confidence.”

For some, the distance between the setting for the trial (The Hague) and the location of the crimes (Sierra Leone) is another problem. With Taylor expected to serve his sentence (yet to be determined) in Britain rather than Africa, the verdict “will have a far less deterrent effect” than it might have precisely in the region “where the use of child soldiers in local, tribal and national armed forces has gone out of control,” argues Abhijit Pandya in The Daily Mail.

For the Liberia-born journalist Robtel Neajai Pailey, of Pambazuka News, this only highlights “the need to reconfigure Africa’s domestic systems of justice, so that we don’t have to rely on the West to judge when, where, and under what circumstances we can punish for transgressions that we deem unacceptable.”

The Taylor trial highlighted discomfort about the West’s treatment of the rest of the world in other ways, too. Some commentators expressed concern that international criminal law doesn’t apply equally. “Many have been able to avoid it,” The Ottawa Citizen points out, “especially those with powerful friends, and those who happen not to be African.”

Taylor was tried before a special court created exclusively to judge crimes committed in Sierra Leone in the 1990s, and so far the work of the International Criminal Court, which has much broader jurisdiction, has targeted mostly suspects from Africa. “Courts build their legitimacy partly based on the cases that they choose to hear,” writes Christine Cheng in Al Jazeera. “By focusing predominantly on Africans, there is a real worry that the I.C.C. will be perceived by non-Western countries as providing a cloak of legitimacy for the U.S. and other Western nations to achieve their political aims.”

“Might, or a seat on the U.N. security council, still appears to be right,” bemoans an editorial in The Guardian. “If impunity is to end, jurisdiction has to be universal.”

There may be a long way to go. “If international criminal justice is on trial,” concludes Afua Hirsch, also in The Guardian “its verdict is not yet out.”