Sierra Leone has one of the highest maternal mortality rates in the world. In developed countries, on average there are fewer than 10 maternal deaths for every 100Â 000 live births. In Sierra Leone, the rate is nearly 200 times higher. This statistic, from the United Nations children’s agency Unicef, is just one of several staggering indicators of the lethal nature of childbirth in one of the world’s poorest countries.
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/ 19 December 2006
The World Bank will give -million to aid development in Sierra Leone and help the desperately poor post-war nation reform the way it is governed, the bank said on Monday. ”The grant will provide critical resources to support elements of the government’s poverty reduction strategy,” the bank said in the statement.
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/ 8 November 2006
The government of Sierra Leone is faced with the challenge of stigma attached to HIV/Aids, which is derailing its efforts to supply ARVs.
United Nations chief Kofi Annan vowed on Monday that the international community will do everything in its power to ensure the success of presidential elections due in Sierra Leone next year. ”We will spare no effort to ensure that it succeeds,” Annan said during a meeting with UN staff in Freetown.
The war crimes trial of the former president of Liberia Charles Taylor could start in The Hague in January next year, a court official in the Sierra Leonean capital Freetown said on Wednesday. Harpinder Athwal, a special assistant to the court’s prosecutor, said the prosecution had handed over 32 000 pages of evidence to Taylor’s defence team.
Former Liberian president Charles Taylor was flown from Freetown on Tuesday to The Netherlands where he will stand trial for war crimes allegedly committed during Sierra Leone’s brutal civil war, court and government officials told Agence France-Presse.
Former Liberian leader Charles Taylor could soon be moved to the Hague for trial now that Britain has agreed to jail the ex-warlord if he is found guilty of war crimes, a British diplomat said on Friday. ”It is up to the United Nations and the international community and the special court to work out details,” Britain’s deputy high commissioner in Freetown, David Dodd, said.
Former Liberian President Charles Taylor’s defence team has some reading to do before his war-crimes trial begins — 32Â 000 pages of documents and witness statements compiled by prosecutors. That gives them plenty to do while officials work out where the trial will be held and where the accused warlord might be jailed if convicted.
Post-war stringent diamond mining rules have bolstered export earnings in Sierra Leone, but the country’s nationals, rated among the poorest in the world, are yet to benefit from the boom. Diamond exports, the West African country’s major source of hard currency earnings, have increased fivefold in as many years.
Former Liberian president Charles Taylor’s interim defence lawyer is in Sierra Leone to challenge attempts to move the warlord’s trial to The Hague, sources close to Taylor said on Tuesday. Karim Khan filed an urgent application to the United Nations-backed Special Court for Sierra Leone to ask that no decision be made on the trial venue until the defence is allowed to comment on the issue.
The Special Court for war crimes in Sierra Leone said on Thursday it had assigned a lawyer free of charge for Liberia’s former warlord and president Charles Taylor, who faces trial for crimes against humanity. Karim Asad Ahmad Khan, a barrister with a British firm, has been appointed to represent Taylor for three months.
Former West African warlord Charles Taylor received his first private visitors on Wednesday, exactly a week after he was arrested, as an international rights group said he must be treated humanely and given a fair trial for crimes against humanity.
The international community is determined to move former Liberian president Charles Taylor’s war crimes trial to The Netherlands, and will even ensure that his defence witnesses will be able to appear there, a United Nations official said. At his first court appearance on Monday before the UN-backed war crimes court, Taylor had asked through his lawyer that his case remain in Sierra Leone.
Rights groups in Sierra Leone said on Tuesday they feared former Liberian president and warlord Charles Taylor, on trial for crimes against humanity, could undermine — or even escape — international justice. Taylor pleaded not guilty on Monday during his first appearance at a United Nations-backed court to charges including murder, mutilation, sexual slavery and use of child soldiers.
Liberian ex-president Charles Taylor, once one of Africa’s most feared strongmen, pleaded not guilty on Monday to charges of crimes against humanity over years of atrocities in Sierra Leone. ”Most definitely, I’m not guilty,” Taylor told Judge Richard Lussick at the United Nations-backed Special Court for Sierra Leone.
The trial of the toppled Liberian president accused of backing a bloody rebellion in his neighbour to the north could take months, according to the chief prosecutor at the special United Nations-backed tribunal that will try Charles Taylor. Prosecutor Desmond de Silva also said security concerns had prompted officials a day before to request that the trial be moved to Europe.
Victims of Sierra Leone’s gruesome rebel war on Thursday hailed the arrest of Liberia’s former president Charles Taylor, who is in United Nations custody in Freetown to face charges of crimes against humanity. Taylor was arrested on Wednesday at the Nigerian border and taken to a detention centre of the UN-backed Special Court for Sierra Leone.
United Nations peacekeepers escorted the captured former Liberian president Charles Taylor into jail on Wednesday at the Sierra Leone tribunal where he is wanted for trial on war-crimes charges. Taylor, handcuffed and looking dejected, was led behind a razor-wired gate into the holding penitentiary where nine other defendants in Sierra Leone’s brutal 1989-2002 civil war are held.
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/ 24 December 2005
Liberia’s president-elect Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf said on Friday she’s deliberating on what should be done about former warlord Charles Taylor, who is in exile in Nigeria but wanted in Sierra Leone on war-crimes charges. Nigeria granted Taylor asylum in 2003 in part to help end Liberia’s own 1989-2003 armed struggle.
Tax officials in Sierra Leone have infuriated Christians with the publication on Monday of newspaper advertisements saying Jesus Christ supported the paying of taxes. The half-page advertisements quoted Jesus’s reply when he was asked if he was against a law requiring the payment of taxes to the Roman emperor.
The United Nations Mission in Sierra Leone may be preparing for the final pullout of its peacekeeping force by the end of the year, but it seems, the mission wants to leave behind a clean record, in so far as sexual exploitation and abuse is concerned. This follows a number of of cases of sexual exploitation in the four years that the peacekeepers have been staying in Sierra Leone.
Angry Sierra Leoneans are demanding that their government ask Guinea to withdraw its troops from their territory, which they occupied five years ago. Troops from Guinea occupied the eastern border town of Yenga during Sierra Leone’s civil war between the rebels of the Revolutionary United Front and government forces.
Ravaged by civil war for almost a decade, Sierra Leone’s fragile stability faces a new threat from drugs. Police say that their eradication campaign is bearing fruit, but some social workers believe that more needs to be done to secure an enduring peace.
A United Nations helicopter on a routine flight in eastern Sierra Leone crashed into a hillside on Tuesday, killing all 24 people on board, a UN spokesperson said. The helicopter, belonging to the Siberian-based UT Air charter company, was on a routine morning flight.
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. Taylor left Liberia on August 11 for exile in Nigeria.
"I will be defending myself because as far as I am concerned, I don’t have any case to answer before this court," said Sam Hinga Norman, on Monday. Although the court officially opened its doors in March, the former deputy defence minister of Sierra Leone and coordinator of the tribal militias known as the "Kamajors" is the first suspect to go on trial at its specially-built premises in the country’s capital — Freetown.
The United Nations-backed court for Sierra Leone, which is to try those who allegedly bear the greatest responsibility for atrocities committed in a decade of civil war, officially opened on Thursday. Three former heads of a pro-government militia during the war appeared in court for the opening trial.
The United Nations-backed war crimes court for Sierra Leone, which was due to rule on Friday on whether former Liberian president Charles Taylor will stand trial on charges he aided rebels in their decade-long war in the West African state, has delayed its decision, a court spokesperson said.
Local elections aren’t a rarity, some would claim. But, they are if you live in Sierra Leone and have not had a say about local councillors in three decades. That the elections are happening is the good news. The bad news is that the contest is not going to be a pretty one.
It was not enough for Charles Taylor to plunder his own West African state of Liberia, encourage rebellion in neighbouring Côte d’Ivoire and make Guinea anxious about its own potential for revolution. Taylor also chose to arm and train the notorious Revolutionary United Front in Sierra Leone, Liberia’s eastern neighbour, in exchange for still-unknown amounts of ”blood diamonds”.
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/ 26 February 2004
Authorities in Sierra Leone have started a campaign to rid the country of its so-called ”pepper doctors”: people who practise medicine under false pretences. The pharmacy board recently joined forces with police to raid the premises of suspected pepper doctors in the capital, Freetown, and elsewhere.
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/ 5 February 2004
Sierra Leone this week completed a five-year programme to disarm and rehabilitate more than 70Â 000 combatants who took part in the country’s brutal civil war. President Ahmad Tejan Kabbah officially dissolved the National Committee for Disarmament, Demobilisation and Reintegration at a ceremony on Tuesday.