BRITAIN has offered to lock up one of Africa’s most bloodthirsty tyrants for life, a move that could lead to several more dictators and warlords being sent to the country’s overcrowded prisons.
Should Charles Taylor, the 58-year-old former President of Liberia, be convicted of war crimes at his trial at The Hague, he will spend his jail term here at a cost to the taxpayer of £70,000 a year. Other criminals who, it was suggested, could follow him include warlords such as the leaders of the rebel Lord’s Resistance Army in Uganda.
Critics will say that Britain can ill afford the cost of jailing international criminals when prisons are full to bursting, and the Home Office is already under attack for its inability to track foreign prisoners convicted in Britain. The Prison Service is on the verge of a record of more than 77,823 inmates in the 139 jails in England and Wales. But ministers said that they wanted to prove their commitment to international justice, and Foreign and Commonwealth Office sources described the move as an “invest-to-save” policy for a country in which Britain has spent £60 million trying to restore order in the past five years.
Britain has been heavily involved in peacekeeping in Sierra Leone, where Mr Taylor is accused of directing rebel fighters during the civil war that left hundreds of thousands of people dead.
The Prison Service has been preparing to hold international war criminals for six years since Jack Straw agreed that Britain would take its share of those found guilty.
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If Mr Taylor were convicted he would initially be assessed as a high-risk, Category A offender and held in the high-security unit — the jail within a jail — at Belmarsh prison, near Woolwich, southeast London. Belmarsh inmates include some of those awaiting trial on charges linked to the July 7 bombings in London.The Government made it clear that war criminals would not benefit from the early-release and parole system for those convicted in British courts.
Margaret Beckett, the Foreign Secretary, said that the offer to jail African tyrants was “in the best tradition of British foreign policy”. To volunteer to jail Mr Taylor had broken an impasse that has stalled the transfer of his trial from Sierra Leone to the International Criminal Court in the Netherlands.
Mrs Beckett said that she had answered a plea from the United Nations after a series of countries, including Austria, Denmark and Sweden, refused to take Mr Taylor. A UN resolution is likely to follow within weeks to allow him to be tried in The Hague. Mrs Beckett said: “We strongly believe in an international system of justice. In the UK, we are prepared, if Charles Taylor is found guilty, to take him and imprison him.
“My decision was driven by two compelling arguments: firstly, that Taylor’s presence in Sierra Leone remains a threat to peace in that region; secondly, that we are demonstrating through concrete action the UK’s commitment to international justice. If we want to live in a just world, we must take responsibility for creating and fostering it.”
Mrs Beckett said that the handing over of Mr Taylor by Nigeria into custody this year was “an historic day” for the people of West Africa but she acknowledged fears that his detention in Sierra Leone posed a threat to regional security. “The international community must not fail them by asking them to run the risk associated with his continued presence in Freetown,” she said.
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Mr Taylor was captured in Nigeria in March and brought to Sierra Leone, where he pleaded not guilty to 11 charges of war crimes, crimes against humanity and violations of international human rights. He allegedly backed rebels who enlisted child soldiers and terrorised victims by chopping off their limbs, ears and lips during the civil war in the 1990s.
The Special Court for Sierra Leone requested that the trial be moved to The Hague for security reasons. But the Netherlands only agreed on condition that a third country agreed to jail him or take him if acquitted. The Foreign Office said yesterday that Britain would not take Mr Taylor as a free man.
Lord Triesman, a Foreign Office minister, said that it would be up to the current Liberian President, Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, to decide who should face further action over the Sierra Leonean civil war. “I hope she will feel that the most serious allegations will be pursued against people who are war criminals, people who have committed massive crimes against humanity,” he said.
Lord Triesman added that bringing the leaders of the rebel Lord’s Resistance Army to court would be another signal that there was no escape from justice for war criminals. “The fact is that these are again people of unusual brutality and . . . if they were arrested andbrought to trial it would, as with Taylor, send a very, very stark message.”