Civil Society Pressure: Ending Charles Taylor's Asylum

No more the charismatic rebel in combat garb. No more bodyguards, ceremonial robes, or denials of gun running, diamond smuggling, and abducting children into militias. In August 2003, Charles Taylor fled war-torn Liberia, the land he once ruled by terror. He now lived in a seaside villa in Nigeria, provided to him by the government there. Protected by the villa’s walls—and the asylum granted to him by President Olusegun Obasanjo of Nigeria—Taylor scoffed at the indictment against him for war crimes. So the question became: What would it take to end Taylor’s asylum and bring him to justice?

Demands that Nigeria arrest Taylor and transfer him to the Special Court for Sierra Leone arose immediately after it became clear that Taylor was, indeed, in Nigeria. The Open Society Justice Initiative led the campaign to have him extradited. It gathered human rights advocates to examine the legal underpinnings of Taylor’s status in Nigeria, and they concluded that his asylum violated both Nigerian and international law. The Justice Initiative subsequently presented the Nigerian authorities with formal requests for a review of Taylor’s status, but these requests yielded nothing but silence. Even attempts by Justice Initiative representatives to discuss the matter with Nigerian government officials came to nothing.

Then, on May 13, 2004, David Anyaele and Emmanuel Egbuna—assisted by the Justice Initiative—initiated judicial review proceedings before Nigeria’s Federal High Court in Abuja to force the Nigerian government to lift Taylor’s asylum and hand him over for trial. Anyaele and Egbuna had sound reasons to seek Taylor’s transfer to the Sierra Leone special court. The men were Nigerian citizens. They had been eking out an existence as traders in Sierra Leone’s capital, Freetown, when, in 1999, they fell into the hands of the Revolutionary United Front (RUF), a rebel militia funded and controlled by Taylor. RUF soldiers hacked off both of Anyaele’s hands, and mutilated Egbuna.

Their only crime was Nigerian citizenship. The militia considered Nigerians enemies, because Nigerian officers were commanding the multinational military contingent known as the Economic Community of West African States Monitoring Group, which was striving to bring some semblance of security to Sierra Leone. The RUF soldiers who chopped off Anyaele’s hands told him to return to Nigeria and show everyone there what Liberia could do.

In order to draw public and official attention to the court case, Nigerian, Liberian, and international human rights advocates organized the Coalition Against Impunity (CAI), an umbrella group whose membership includes more than 345 NGOs from 17 African countries as well as Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the Nigerian Coalition on the International Criminal Court, and the Transitional Justice Working Group in Liberia. Th e Justice Initiative was a founding member of CAI, conceiving and forging its formation and spearheading its advocacy work across West Africa. As the court case unfolded, CAI helped make the Nigerian public aware of Anyaele and Egbuna and the courage they were showing by coming forward, as plaintiff s, to demand Taylor’s handover in defiance of President Obasanjo’s decision to grant him asylum. Senior government officials who had previously ignored the case began to voice sympathy for Anyaele and Egbuna.

Only after the court proceedings commenced did Nigeria’s government formally admit that it had offered Taylor asylum. A spokesman for Taylor asserted that Taylor’s stay in Nigeria was a political arrangement, something not subject to Nigeria’s judiciary, which effectively meant that Taylor even considered himself to be above the law of his host country. In November 2004, the Justice Initiative filed an amicus curiae brief in support of Anyaele and Egbuna’s application. The brief summarized the obligation states have to surrender or prosecute persons accused of serious international crimes and to deny refugee status to such accused, including Charles Taylor.

Nigeria’s government attempted to drag out the court proceedings and used police pressure in an attempt to intimidate CAI members. In July and August 2005, Nigeria’s State Security Service arrested a number of Nigerians who had been calling for Taylor’s arrest and extradition, holding them in custody for five days. Security forces arrested Steve Omali and Michael Damisa and seized 10,000 copies of “Wanted” posters bearing Taylor’s picture—reprints of a poster Interpol had issued for Taylor in 2003. A day later, two persons claiming to be members of the State Security Service visited the Justice Initiative’s offices, clearly in connection with its efforts to spearhead the call to arrest Taylor. These tactics backfired, embarrassing the Nigerian government. Pressure from abroad and from within Nigeria and its government forced the leadership to end its surveillance and harassment activities.

In November 2005, after 18 months of legal wrangling, the Federal High Court ruled that Anyaele and Egbuna had legal standing as plaintiff s and that their suit could proceed. This ruling effectively removed any legal support for Taylor’s asylum in Nigeria, but the government appealed the ruling, thereby initiating new delays. In Liberia itself, however, CAI members were pushing the issue of Taylor’s extradition to the forefront of the political agenda. For months, CAI members called upon candidates running for office in Liberia to take a position on Taylor’s asylum in Nigeria and declare that, if elected, they would support demanding the warlord’s extradition to Liberia and transfer to Sierra Leone’s special court. On November 23, 2005, the state electoral commission declared Ellen Sirleaf Johnson to be the winner of Liberia’s presidential election. In March 2006, she officially requested that Nigeria hand Taylor over.

On March 17, 2006, President Obasanjo confirmed that Nigeria had received Liberia’s request, but he notified African leaders that Nigeria had not yet decided whether it would comply. By March 25, however, after representatives from Liberia and Nigeria met to discuss the question, Obasanjo had relented. Nigeria announced that it would allow the Liberian authorities to arrest Taylor. Three days later, Taylor disappeared from the walled villa on Nigeria’s seacoast. Nigerian border guards captured him at dawn on March 29, trying to cross Nigeria’s frontier into Cameroon. The Nigerian authorities placed Taylor on a plane to Liberia. There, he was transferred to a waiting United Nations helicopter and transported to Sierra Leone to face charges. On June 20, 2006, the tribunal moved him to a more secure prison cell in the Netherlands. His trial began in The Hague in June 2007.

The civil society campaign waged by the Justice Initiative and other advocacy organizations to flush Charles Taylor out of hiding—including both the legal efforts to have the Nigerian authorities quash his asylum and CAI’s public advocacy efforts—played a key role in the sequence of events that led to his incarceration in a holding cell in The Hague. The campaign encouraged CAI to begin examining other cases involving leadership figures and human rights abuses in Africa, and the Justice Initiative will continue to provide resources and expertise to justice advocates working to bring human rights violators to trial.