Category Archives: taylor

Taylor Judgment: a "victory for justice"?

Posted on September 26, 2013 | 5 comments
Following the confirmation of the 50 year sentence of Charles Taylor, there is a tone of celebration from a number of human rights organisations. One expression that has struck me as problematic is that of this verdict being a “victory for justice”, as seen for example in this tweet by Human Rights Watch executive director:

On a certain level, I of course understand what he means. This verdict is seen as vindication for some of the victims of the Sierra Leone conflict and in this sense constitutes “justice”. However, I think that the expression is disturbing in what it says on the state of mind of those who use it.

Indeed, technically, if you trust the legal system, a conviction is no more a “victory for justice” than an acquittal would be. It is the system that must be seen as just, irrespective of the particular outcome in a given case. If we do not accept that acquittals are an option, then there is no point in pretending to want a system of international criminal justice, with a strong protection of the rights of the defense. We might as well reintroduce summary executions, which, I’m sure would satisfy some victims just as much.

On the substance, I’m not entirely sure how much of a “victory for justice” it is, when you see the systematic violations of the rights of the defense in international criminal proceedings. The acts that are being prosecuted are the most heinous crimes that affect the “conscience of humanity”, and the highest standards of evidence should be imposed, rather than the lowest ones, as is sometimes the case.

Attachment to these high standards of justice in the respect of the rights of the defense should be the first concern of all people involved in this field, because it is at the heart of the international criminal justice project. Without a fair trial, there cannot be, on the long run, any victory for justice.

5 Comments

Posted in scsl, taylor

First thoughts on the Taylor Appeal Judgment: Sentence upheld and Perisic blasted

Posted on September 26, 2013 | 2 comments
As I logged on to the livestream of the SCSL this morning at 10.30, there was a song playing on a loop with the most extraordinary lyrics: “i just can’t stand to see you go, i don’t understand where we went wrong” (it’s a song by Bonnie James called Happy Home). For a second I thought this was a subliminal way for the Court to announce an acquittal… But it turned out not to be the case, as the Appeals Chamber of the Special Court for Sierra Leone has confirmed the 50 year sentence against Charles Taylor. Having followed the reading out of the summary, there is mostly nothing very surprising about the Appeals Judgment. They confirm that crimes against the civilian population were committed by the RUF-AFRC and that Taylor had some role in the events. There are a few points that deserve some comments in my view, until we actually get the judgement.First of all, the AC discussed the question of evidence. It essentially approved of the Trial Chamber’s approach to evidence, specifically rejecting the claim from the defense that uncorroborated hearsay evidence as a sole basis for conviction should not be allowed. I find that quite appalling frankly, but thus is the nature of the international criminal procedure.

Of course, everybody was waiting for the discussion on aiding and abetting after the Perisic appeal judgement at the ICTY on the question of “specific direction”. As discussed by Manuel Ventura here, there could have been an impact on the Taylor appeal judgement. It turns out that there wasn’t because the Appeals Chamber upheld the Trial Judgment on the fact that you need a “substantial contribution” to the crime for the actus reus of aiding and abetting to be constituted, and that knowledge is sufficient mens rea. The Appeals Chamber seems to have gone out of its way to not just ignore Perisic, but actually blast it. Continue reading →

2 Comments

Posted in scsl, sentencing, taylor

Some thoughts on the Lubanga Sentence: A throw of the dice

Posted on July 10, 2012 | 1 comment
The International Criminal Court issued its first sentence today in the Lubanga case. In a thankfully short Decision, the Trial Chamber sentenced him to 14 years, minus time served. There is a nice summary of the reasoning by Jennifer Easterday over at IntLawGrrls and here are a few first thoughts on the criteria for determining the sentence and the actual sentence he received. I will discuss the Chamber’s view on Ocampo’s conduct in the next post.

  • The criteria for determining the sentence

In a previous post on the Taylor Sentencing Judgment, I expressed some concerns on the confusion between the underlying rationale for having international criminal courts in the first place, and the specific criteria taken into account for the sentencing.These concerns equally arise here. Indeed, I am not convinced by the fact that the Decision refers to the Preamble of the Rome Statute (§16) as a source of inspiration. The Preamble applies to all the crimes, and is not a justification for considering that a particular crime is of particular gravity. This confusion gives rise to meaningless and empty statements like (§37):

“The crimes of conscripting and enlisting children under the age of fifteen and using them to participate actively in hostilities are undoubtedly very serious crimes that affect the international community as a whole.”

That is certainly true, and indeed explains why the crime is contained in the Statute in the first place. But it doesn’t explain the particular gravity for the purposes of sentencing.

A more relevant factor is the particular vulnerability of the children, even if one could, in theory, contest this as well as an unwarranted classification of harm, especially as International Criminal Law continues to refuse to acknowledge the idea of a hierarchy of crimes, thus rejecting the easiest conceptual basis for a differentiation in sentencing.

On a more positive note, I particularly appreciate two aspects of the decision. The first one is that the Judges made clear that factors were not considered twice, i.e, factors considered for the purposes of gravity were not taken into account as aggravating circumstances. This was applied, for example, to the fact that the victims were “particularly defenseless” (§78). The second positive aspect is the rather careful approach of the Majority to the consideration of sexual violence as an aggravating circumstance. While I have my doubts as to whether this should be considered at all because Lubanga was not charged with the crime, once the Judges did do so, they set a high threshold, considering that (§69):

However, that said, it remains necessary for the Chamber to be satisfied beyond reasonable doubt that: (i) child soldiers under 15 were subjected to sexual violence; and (ii) this can be attributed to Mr Lubanga in a manner that reflects his culpability, pursuant to Rule 145(1 )(a) of the Rules.

Based on this test, the Majority found that there was no sufficient evidence to suggest that Lubanga ordered or encouraged this practice and therefore refused to consider it as an aggravating circumstance.

The Chamber also deals with the OTP decision not to charge sexual violence and the OTP’s misconduct during the trial, but I will discuss these issues together in a separate post.

  • Determination of the sentence
With all this in mind, the judges were all set to reveal the final figure for the sentence. On this, the decision clearly leaves us in the dark on why 14 years, as international judgments often do. The Decision starts by mentioning the SCSL judgments which have considered this crime, with sentences ranging from 7 years to 50 years, which is certainly not of much help. And then, after 25 pages of factors that were or were not considered, the result, 14 years, falls from the sky without the reader being any more enlightened, despite the appearance of explanation. The Judge might as well have thrown dice and rendered a one-page decision.
To be fair, the Judges do explicitly say that in the absence of any aggravating circumstances, a life sentence (which the OTP had actually not asked for anyway) would be inappropriate (§96). The Chamber also rejects the OTP suggestion that a baseline of 24 years should be adopted for all crimes, notwithstanding the fact that this is not provided for in the Statute. I must admit that I have sympathy for the OTP’s position, which would be a step in the direction of some predictability. And the final sentence decided upon by the Chamber is not any more in the Statute than the baseline proposed by the OTP. 
But apart from these clarifications, the Judges do not specifically explain why 14 years. The OTP had asked for 30 years. The Chamber says that it has taken into account all the circumstances of the case to come up with the final figure.What number did the judges start from to add years for the particular gravity of the crime or deduct time for the mitigating circumstances? Why is there a different sentence for conscripting (13 years), enlisting (12 years) and using the children in hostilies (14 years)? Of course, one can see the logic there, but it would have been nice to have some explicit clarifications.
The whole absurdity of the process is illustrated by the (unsurprising) dissent by Judge Odio Benito. In a 12-page dissent (so a third of the majority decision), the Judge expresses her “strong” and “firm” disagreement on the fact that the Chamber did not sufficiently take into account the sexual violence that occured as a consequence of the commission of the crime. But as a result of this disregard for “the damage caused to the victims and their families” (dissent, §2), Judge Benito suggests a whooping one year increase (15 years instead of 14 years) to the sentence imposed by the Majority. This is of course ridiculous. Assuming that Judge Benito is right in what she says, this one year differential hardly deserves the time spent writing  (and more particularly, reading) the dissent.

1 Comment

Posted in bensouda, ICC, lubanga, ocampo, taylor

Sentencing Taylor, Suffering Victims and Collective Crimes: The Limits of International Criminal Law

Posted on June 11, 2012 | Leave a comment
Cross-posted on Opinio Juris

On the 30thof May, the SCSL sentenced Charles Taylor to 50 years in prison. The sentencing judgment raises a number of interesting issues. some commentators, such as William Schabas, or on Opinio Juris, Marina Aksenova, have discussed the length of the sentence, finding it either too long, or adequate, depending on the preferred objectives of criminal justice (rehabilitation, retribution, deterrence). Wherever one stands on this issue, I think that, despite it being common practice in a number of international judgments, handing down a single sentence for the entire array of crimes convicted, rather than having them individualized does not help achieve the goals one ascribes to sentencing. Indeed, how can there be deterrence, if there is no knowledge that a specific crime for which a person is convicted carries a specific sentence? There is also a problem of predictability, because we don’t know what the judges would have decided if Taylor had for a reason or another been acquitted on one of the counts. The only thing that can be taken out of the sentencing is that it is condemnable to generally participate in the events, and the fact that a couple of crimes more or less took place in the course of things becomes irrelevant.

Which brings me to the main point I want to address here: the limits of criminal law in addressing mass atrocities, both because of the question of gravity and because of the collective dimension of the acts.

  • The question of gravity
I have often commented here on the difficult assessment of the criteria of gravity in the ICC framework. In a nutshell, given the fact that the ICC, and international tribunals in general, are competent to prosecute the gravest crimes of interest to the international community as a whole, how does one define an additional notion of gravity within this context? This is made even more complicated because most people refuse to open the Pandora’s Box of a hierarchy of crimes, which would be reflected in sentencing. But if all international crimes are equally grave, then how do you justify given a higher sentence for one of them rather than the other? It essentially boils down the moral outrage of the individual judges. The Taylor sentencing judgment illustrates this point.





Indeed, the Judges start their assessment by claiming that “the Accused has been found responsible for aiding and abetting as well as planning some of the most heinous and brutal crimes recorded in human history” (§70). They then go on to describe the suffering of the victims, both physically and psychologically, stating that “their suffering will be life-long” (§72) that the effects on “society as a whole” are “devastating” and that many Sierra Leoneans, victims of the crimes, were “no longer productive members of society” (§74).

This is all very true, but, not too sound cold-hearted, should these elements be factors in sentencing? Again, the whole rationalebehind the creation of international tribunals is to address crimes which have these consequences. International crimes usually target vulnerable populations, are generally widespread and affect a society as a whole. But once these tribunals exist and function, the gravity of the crimes that justified their creation should, to a large extent, take a backseat in the daily work of the institution and the fact that “the Trial Chamber witnessed many survivors weeping as they testified, a decade after the end of the conflict” (§71) is, to put it bluntly, irrelevant. Of course, international tribunals operate as an element of post-conflict social reconstruction, but it does not mean that this transforms international judges in assessors of whether the crimes are the most heinous in human history or on the long-term effects on society as a whole. All international crimes are heinous and leave a mark on human history. All international crimes cause great suffering to their victims. That this suffering has been increasingly acknowledged is certainly a good thing, but I think that international criminal justice, as it gains in maturity, now needs less hyberbolic victim-oriented rhetoric, not more.

  • The relationship between individual responsibility and State responsibility
Beyond that, one sees here the difficulty of applying a traditional criminal law approach, with individual responsibility, to situations which are essentially collective, both in their consequences and their perpetration.

In relation to that, I was puzzled by one paragraph of the sentencing judgment relating to the extraterritoriality of the crimes, which the Trial Chamber apparently took into account as an aggravating factor (§27). What is striking is that the Chamber did not approach this from a factual point of view, i.e Charles Taylor being in Liberia took part in crimes being committed in Sierra Leone, a neighboring State. The Trial Chamber chose to approach this from an international law perspective, linking this with the principle of non-intervention, which, it recalls, is a customary law rule established by the ICJ in the Nicaragua case. The Judges consider that “while these provisions of customary law govern conduct between States, the Trial Chamber considers that the violation of this principle by a Head of State individually engaging in criminal conduct can be taken into account as an aggravating factor” (§27).

This is the first time I see this in a judgment of an international criminal tribunal. The sentencing judgment does not reference any other case as support for its approach, and a quick search in the ICTY database has come up with nothing. Essentially, the SCSL has pronounced itself on the international responsibility of Liberia, acting through its head of State. While one can doubt the adequacy of including such a paragraph in the first place, it would have deserved a longer development than this ambiguous sentence on a principle that does not bind individuals, but the violation of which by the said individuals can be taken into account nonetheless, which is, as it stands, certainly a peculiar statement in terms of legal reasoning.

The paragraph does however have the benefit of raising the issue of the link between individual responsibility and the collective (State) dimension of international crimes. This is a regular feature of debates in international criminal law, whether in relation to the common plan or policy requirement for genocide, the State or organizational policy for crimes against humanity, or the explicit recognition in the definition of aggression that you need a State act before prosecuting an individual for the crime. While it is beyond the scope of this brief commentary to address this adequately, it begs the eternal question that should never be forgotten when discussing the philosophy of international criminal law: when does the organizational requirement for the commission of an international crime actually negate the relevancy of attributing individual criminal responsibility for that act?

Leave a comment

Posted in gravity, scsl, sentencing, taylor