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The
notable Jamaican born British jurist Barrister Courtenay Griffiths, a
Queen's Counsel (QC) in the British legal system, has been explaining his
decision to defend former rebel in chief, ex-President of Liberia and war
crime indictee Mr. Charles G. Taylor before the U.N backed Special Court
for Sierra Leone which is sitting the Hague the Netherlands.
According to the online free encyclopedia Wikipedia, Born in Kingston,
Jamaica, the second youngest child of a carpenter father, Griffiths moved
to England with his family in 1961 and was raised in Coventry. Educated at
Bablake School, he graduated in 1978 with an LLB (Hons) from the London
School of Economics. Today, he practices predominantly in criminal
defense, most often defending in murder cases, spending a large amount of
his time at the Old Bailey. He also sits part time in the Crown Court as a
Recorder,[4] chairs the Public Affairs Committee of the Bar Council, and
worked for several years as chair of its Race Relations Committee
In an interview with the BBC monitored in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania on
Thursday, Barrister Griffiths held that "the morality of Charles Taylor is
none of my business."
He continued his defense of representing one of the worlds notorious
insurgent leader by saying ""That's between him and his God, whichever God
he chooses to worship. My job is to present his case in court. I'm
certainly not going to be making moral judgments about any of my clients.
I've defended, for example, terrorists - but to make a moral judgment
about such defendants is to forget that, you know, one man's terrorist is
another man's war hero."
The statement often attributed the late Yasser Arafat, Arafat -
Palestinian leader, Nobel Peace Prize Winner and President of Palestinian
Authority from 1996 - 2004 is viewed by political watchers as a shrewd
attempt by the learned defense attorney to equate the morality of his
client's actions to that of other notable resistance leaders including
George Washington, "father of the US", Jomo Kenyatta, leader of Mau Mau
resistance in colonialzed Kenya or the celebrated South African Nobel
laureate and former President Nelson Madiba Mandela of the African
National Congress(ANC).
Mr. Taylor is accused by prosecutors of instigating and waging a campaign
of murder, rape, mutilation, sexual slavery and conscription of child
solders during the wars in Liberia and Sierra Leone which dislocated
nearly 1 million people and killed an estimated 250,000 others in the
1990's in West Africa. Mr. Taylor has consistently denied the charges.
Barrister Griffiths told the BBC "My job is to present a case, and it's
for the jury or for the judge to decide that issue. Consequently, it's not
a question that I ask. I may have my own suspicions, but at the end of the
day I'm not the person returning the verdict, so consequently my views are
totally immaterial."
In an interview in October, 2008, the lead defense counsel for Mr. Taylor
in explaining his reason why Mr. Taylor should be well represented in his
trial told the Project of the Open Society for Justice Initiative
that..."this whole area of international criminal law has suffered an
image problem in the past because all of the international tribunals which
have been set up, it is almost as if the defense have been an afterthought
and that the concentration and the emphasis has always been on prosecution
which gives the impression that these are in effect Kangaroo Courts where
the verdict is a foregone conclusion. And often times if you are a
Milosevic or you are a Charles Taylor, before you arrive in these Courts,
the media at large have already suggested that you are guilty. And it
seems to me imperative in those situations that individuals like Milosevic
and like Taylor have the best defense available if the whole area of
international criminal justice is to gain any kind of credibility
worldwide."
The accomplished but tough-talking lawyer who is having his first foray
into active international criminal justice with the representation of Mr.
Taylor is not one who is given to "niceties" as evident from his recent
cross examination of prosecution witness and super model Ms. Naomi
Campbell and her former agent Carole White at the trial in the Hague in
early August, 2010.
He bluntly told Ms. White that the motive of her evidence for the
prosecution was "all a lie; it is all about the money and there aint
nothing funny," an apparent attempt to portray Ms White as someone who was
favoring a good outcome in a separate lawsuit against her former client
and model Naomi Campbell. Ms. White, after a pregnant pause responded that
elements of her testimony to Judges of the Special Court which
contradicted Ms. Campbell's prior testimony was "not a lie."
Barrister Griffiths was installed as Taylor's lead defense counsel on
August 1, 2007. In preparation for the trial, he visited Liberia and
Sierra Leone and has charged that the UN travel ban on some of the
potential and important witnesses for Mr. Taylor will have a "chilling
effect" especially those sympathetic to his client.
He further defends his current legal exercise by saying that although he
is aware that his defense of people like Mr. Taylor is controversial, his
conscience remains "clear".
"Our system of justice cannot operate unless there is a semblance of
equality between prosecution and defense," he said, adding, "otherwise, it
becomes an inquisition and that would soon lose the confidence of the
public."
Audiences worldwide including the West Africa sub region which bore the
brunt of the decade plus conflagration and bloodletting have been
captivated by the live media coverage of the trial. Mr. Taylor is the last
defendant being tried by the Court. A verdict is expected in early 2011.
Britain has announced that it will provide a jail cell for Mr. Taylor if
he were found guilty.
By Emmanuel Abalo in Philadelphia and the BBC World Service
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Barrister Griffiths
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