LONDON: Liberia’s former president and warlord Charles Taylor is to serve out his 50-year prison sentence for war crimes in a British jail, Britain confirmed yesterday.
Taylor, 65, is likely to spend the rest of his life behind bars in Britain after the UN-backed Special Court for Sierra Leone (SCSL) in The Hague upheld his sentence for arming rebels during Sierra Leone’s brutal civil war during the 1990s.
“Former president Taylor will now be transferred to a prison in the UK to serve that sentence,” Britain’s junior justice minister Jeremy Wright said in a statement to parliament.
The justice ministry refused to disclose which jail would house the former strongman. “We don’t comment on individual cases,” a ministry spokeswoman said.
SCSL public affairs chief Peter Andersen confirmed that the order to send Taylor to a British jail was made public on Thursday.
But Andersen reiterated that the specific jail “would be a matter for the British authorities.” He confirmed that Taylor was still at the UN’s detention unit in The Hague yesterday.
Andersen said in an email that details of Taylor’s transfer to Britain “remain confidential until after the transfer is complete, for security reasons.”
Taylor’s landmark sentence — on 11 counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity — was the first handed down by an international court against a former head of state since the Nazi trials at Nuremberg in 1946.
He had been arrested in 2006 and sentenced at The Hague last year for “some of the most heinous crimes in human history”.
As Liberia’s president from 1997 to 2003, Taylor supplied guns and ammunition to rebels in neighbouring Sierra Leone in a conflict notorious for its mutilations, drugged child soldiers and sex slaves, judges said.
AFP
