Former Liberian president Charles Taylor could be brought to trial in the near future if the government of Liberia issues a request, said United Nations officials visiting the Sierra Leone capital, Freetown, on Friday.
“There should be no impunity for people who have been alleged to have committed the sorts of crimes [listed in the] … indictment issued against Taylor,” said ambassador Emyr Jones Parry on a one-day stop in Freetown.
The head of the 14-member UN Security Council delegation touring West Africa added that any trial should not be allowed to threaten Liberia’s young peace process.
“The timing of bringing anybody before the court is a mix both of the indictment and of the circumstances of the case,” Parry said.
Taylor left Liberia on August 11 for exile in Nigeria, where he has so far been protected from the jurisdiction of a UN-backed special court that has indicted him for war crimes in that country’s decade-long civil war.
Perry said that any trial of Taylor would mark a third stage in Liberia’s post-conflict recovery process after firstly stopping the fighting and secondly beginning a process of truth and reconciliation.
“I think we’re getting towards that third stage in the case of Liberia,” he said.
“The question therefore is when should Taylor be actually brought before the court,” he said, adding that the conditions for that have been set out by the president of Nigeria.
“It’s really a question of whether a request is made and how that should be dealt with,” he added.
President Olusegun Obasanjo of Nigeria has repeatedly said that his country will hand over Taylor to the special court if the Liberian government requests it.
So far Gyude Bryant has declined to make such a request for fear of destabilising a 10-month old peace process.
Parry said that of immediate concern is ensuring that the special court has sufficient funds to enable it to work.
In mid-March, the Secretary General of the UN, Kofi Annan, warned that the special court faced a $20-million budgetary shortfall.
Over the coming weeks the UN must decide how to end a peacekeeping mission that was once the largest in the world with 17 500 international troops. A deadline for a plan detailing the winding-down of that operation has been set for September 30.
At the end of March, the Security Council voted to extend the presence of peacekeeping forces in Sierra Leone by six months until June 2005 amid concerns that security in the country remains fragile. — Irin