| Hadn't heard 'bout Chuckles for a little while. |
A U.N.-backed court for Sierra Leone ruled Monday that ousted Liberian leader Charles Taylor is not immune from prosecution for war crimes. Taylor, in exile in Nigeria, is the most prominent figure indicted by the war crimes court. He is accused him of backing Sierra Leone's rebels in a brutal civil war while he was president of neighboring Liberia. The court's three judges, in a brief ruling, said that Taylor's claim of immunity as a former head of state did not apply, because the U.N.-Sierra Leone court is international, not national. New York-based Human Rights Watch welcomed the ruling, calling it a ''victory for Taylor's many victims.'' It ''puts dictators in Africa and elsewhere on notice that if they commit similar crimes, they will not be shielded from international justice,'' Reed Brody, a Human Rights Watch special counsel, said in a statement. The organization urged Nigeria to turn over Taylor for trial. | That would be entertaining. |
The court is scheduled Thursday to begin trying indicted figures from Sierra Leone's 10-year war, in which rebels waged an escalating terror campaign for control of the country's diamond fields, frequently hacking off the limbs of men, women and children. Armed intervention by neighboring Guinea, Britain and the United Nations finally broke the rebels, who signed a peace deal in 2002. | Just don't let Carla DelPonte in the door. |
|