The judgement in the case against Charles Taylor was read out yesterday at the SCSL chamber in The Hague. Because it went on for over an hour, some of us might have missed what happened right at the very end. And even if we had caught it, only those actually in the court room were privy to his full remarks.
The international criminal law bureau learned of Justice Sow's remarks, and reported them here. In his quite extraordinary but short speech, he questions the fairness of the "whole system" that convicted Charles Taylor. The brevity of his remarks makes it difficult to determine the precise extent of his concern with the project and whether it stops with the SCSL or implicates the ICL project more generally. Either way, it has implications for the entire field as the criticisms of the Charles Taylor prosecution were surely not unique to the SCSL.
Might this then mark the beginning of some honest discussion about the direction ICL is heading in, so lacking in last year's ICTY legacy conference? Let's hope so.
