Courtenay “Braveheart” Griffiths Speaks!

This is what Courtenay Griffiths QC, who defended the former Liberian president Charles Taylor before the Special Court for Sierra Leone, said at the ICC conference organised by IC Events in London on 18 May 2012.

What a lot of people don’t realise about me is that I was a newcomer to international criminal law when in June 2007 I was approached to defend Charles Taylor, the former president of Liberia. What I came to realise very quickly was that international law is not about law at all; that what it is about is the politics of power and the pursuit of Western interests.

So I want to make six points. I want to be quite provocative because I want to provoke a debate. Like Braveheart, I have come here to pick a fight!

Now, the first point I want to make is this: I have listened with interest to all the useful contributions made today and there is a certain word that has not been mentioned by anybody. That word is “profit”, and what I am talking about here is the correlation between Western strategic and economic interests and the use of international criminal law to pursue those interests.

Two examples: Number one is that Charles Taylor, my client, told me that he was playing tennis one day when he received a phone call. He had been negotiating with the US oil company Halliburton about oil concessions off the coast of Liberia. As I am sure you all realise, running around the Gulf of Guinea from Equatorial Guinea and all the way round, is a large offshore oil-bearing strata which Ghana is just beginning to exploit.

Taylor told me that Halliburton was offering him a ridiculous rate, and he wanted to negotiate with the Chinese. The phone call was from a senior officer at Halliburton who told him: “Mr President, unless we can make this deal, we cannot protect you any longer.”

Let me give you another example. In all this debate about human rights violations in Darfur, Sudan, one thing has never been publicly acknowledged. Darfur just happens to sit on a sea of oil. A bit of a surprise that! And looking at it from a Western point of view, given [President Omar] El-Bashir’s link with the Chinese, you can understand why the West might want for their own economic interests to have an independent Darfur.

So we need to get real here and understand what the real dynamic is, what is taking place at the fundamental level. You do not have to be a Marxist to recognise that economics is always the substructure upon which these superstructures are built. My second point is this, and it is a point touched upon by Dr Phil Clarke this morning: The referral mechanism at the ICC […] is also a mechanism to get rid of the awkward political opponents.

Let me give you an example. The Special Court for Sierra Leone was set up to try those who had the greatest responsibility for what occurred in that country.

Hinga Norman, who was the deputy defence minister, was put on trial at that Court, but sadly he died. Now, guess who was the defence minister at that time and effectively Hinga Norman’s boss – President Ahmad Tejan Kabbah! Now, why would you put the second in command on trial and not the man who bore the greatest responsibility? Why not?

Apparently, the word on the ground is that David Crane, that deranged, evangelical, former CIA operative who was the first prosecutor of that case, wanted to go against Kabbah but the British government didn’t want it to happen.

So [the British government under Tony Blair] parachuted Sir Desmond de Silva in to act as a firewall to prevent Kabbah’s prosecution.

Why? To protect the Blair government, which contrary to a UN arms embargo, through Sandline and other means, had been breaking that embargo and providing arms to Kabbah.
The last thing the British wanted was Kabbah, in his defence, saying: “Not me, it was Tony Blair.” So, again, no prosecution of Kabbah.

The third point I want to make is this. Charles Taylor made a speech in mitigation at the Special Court for Sierra Leone. I commend it to all of you.

In it he outlines how it was that the president of the US decided that it was time for regime change in Liberia and the  parallels with what happened to Colonel [Muammar] Gathafi in Libya.

My learned friend Mr Rod Dixon, in relation to Saif Gathafi [the Colonel’s son], asked the question why there had been this change in attitude by [the ICC prosecutor] Louis Moreno-Ocampo on the one hand, when it chimed with Western interests, wanting Gathafi prosecuted at the ICC.

But the minute the Western project of regime change had succeeded, he changed tack and said that Saif can be tried in Libya.

‘If I were Tony Blair’

My cynical mind says to me: “If I were Tony Blair, would I want my former friend Saif given a platform in The Hague, free of an interrogator or a torturer behind him, to tell us about the dirty gas deals and oil deals he did in order to secure the release of the Lockerbie bomber? Would the West want Saif Gathafi to be talking about the unlawful rendition that allowed [his father] Gathafi to conduct torture on behalf of the US?” Maybe I am just being cynical.

Recall that Taylor was convicted on the basis of aiding and abetting combatant forces in a neighbouring country, knowing that they were committing atrocities?
Help me here. What did the US do with the contras in Nicaragua? What did Kissinger do in Indonesia, in East Timor?

I am not arguing that because of what happened in Nicaragua, Indonesia and East Timor, Taylor should not have been tried.

But when I went to university to study law, I was told that whether you are a princess or prostitute, whether you are the president of the US or the president of Liberia, the law should be above you. I want Taylor’s historic precedent to mean that, if it means anything.

My final point is that a West African in the Special Court for Sierra Leone was disrespected, big time, in that Court. That man, a judge from Senegal, Justice Malick Sow, who had sat in these proceedings as an alternate judge since its inception, attempted to read a dissenting judgement in which he said, one, “there had been no deliberations”, and secondly, “that this whole international law project was doomed”.

You know what happened to him? The three other judges got up and walked out even before he started. They switched his microphone off and dropped the blinds on the public gallery. And then it was announced that that judge had been suspended for misconduct.

Why? Because he said that as far as he was concerned, he did not think that Taylor was guilty. And that Court tried to silence him. Why? Because that was not the legacy they wanted to leave. And that is just not good enough if we are talking about the law.