\n Liberia's president may be moving to get a long-awaited war crimes court up and running but he already faces criticism over his choice for a key post at the tribunal.\n<\/p>\n
\n The row is a fresh reminder that justice for victims of the country's civil wars remains still a long way off.\n<\/p>\n
\n President Joseph Boakai signed a decree on May 2 creating an office responsible for setting up the court to judge war crimes, after years of international and domestic pressure.\n<\/p>\n
\n But in late June, he appointed lawyer Jonathan Massaquoi to head up the process.\n<\/p>\n
\n It was Massaquoi who represented former president Charles Taylor's ex-wife against war crimes accusations.\n<\/p>\n
\n And when Agnes Reeves Taylor sued defenders of the victims of war crimes for defamation, he was also her lawyer in that case.\n<\/p>\n
\n Massaquoi also defended former rebel commander Gibril Massaquoi, a Sierra Leonean with no relation jailed by a Swiss court for 20 years in 2023 for a string of murders, rapes and acts of torture that he or rebels of the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) carried out in Liberia between 1999 and 2003.\n<\/p>\n
\n - Charged, then released -\n<\/p>\n
\n The West African nation's two civil wars left an estimated 250,000 people dead between 1989 and 2003 and resulted in massacres, mutilation, rape and cannibalism.\n<\/p>\n
\n Reeves Taylor was arrested in Britain, where she was living, in 2017.\n<\/p>\n
\n She was charged there with torture for her alleged participation in atrocities committed by Charles Taylor's group, the National Patriotic Front of Liberia (NPFL), during the first civil war.\n<\/p>\n
\n But she was released in 2019 after a court decided to dismiss the charges against her.\n<\/p>\n
\n Among the rights activists Reeves Taylor targeted in her defamation action was Hassan Bility, director of the NGO Global Justice and Research.\n<\/p>\n
\n He told AFP the case had yet to be resolved. Asked about Massaquoi's appointment to the tribunal, he said: \"We do not think that the pains of the victims should be commercialised in any way or form.\"\n<\/p>\n
\n Peterson Sonyah, head of the Liberian Massacre Survivors Association, was also unhappy.\n<\/p>\n
\n \"It hurts me to see those who fought against us war victims in court going to spearhead a position at the war crimes special court of Liberia,\" he said. \"We feel hurt.\"\n<\/p>\n
\n It showed a complete lack of respect for the activists who had pushed so hard over the years to get the tribunal set up.\n<\/p>\n
\n Massaquoi did not respond to requests for comment from AFP.\n<\/p>\n
\n - Convictions abroad -\n<\/p>\n
\n President Boakai has said the process would bring \"justice and closure to the scars and memories\" from the \"senseless\" conflicts.\n<\/p>\n
\n But rights groups, while welcoming recent moves to get the tribunal off the ground, have stressed in a report to the UN that much remains to be done.\n<\/p>\n
\n They have pointed out, for example, that Boakai has so far made no provision for the awarding of reparations to victims.\n<\/p>\n
\n While no trials have taken place within Liberia, a number of convictions have been secured abroad.\n<\/p>\n
\n Charles Taylor was sentenced to 50 years in prison for crimes against humanity and war crimes committed in neighbouring Sierra Leone, and is serving his sentence in the United Kingdom.\n<\/p>\n
\n But he has not been prosecuted for his actions in Liberia.\n<\/p>\n
\n A number of accused warlords remain influential in their communities.\n<\/p>\n
\n One of the most prominent of these is the senator Prince Johnson, once filmed in a video sipping beer while his men tortured then-president Samuel Doe to death in 1990.\n<\/p>\n
\n The country's Vice-President Jeremiah Koung is a known ally of Prince Johnson.\n<\/p>\n
\n Johnson in April endorsed a parliamentary resolution in favour of a court, which he had previously opposed.\n<\/p>\n
\n But he quickly backtracked, warning that enforcing the establishment of such a court was \"looking for trouble in the country\".<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Liberia's president may be moving to get a long-awaited war crimes court up and running but he already faces criticism over his choice for a key post at the tribunal. The row is a fresh reminder that justice for victims of the country's civil wars remains still a long way off. President Joseph Boakai signed […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":60,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[553],"tags":[],"ji_location":[],"class_list":["post-133781","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-live-feed"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n