He then fled to Nigeria.Įventually, Nigerian authorities arrested Taylor and handed him back to Liberia, which quickly passed him off to Sierra Leone for trial in 2006. But Taylor then fell from power in 2003, in the midst of a rebel insurgency. Prosecutors from an international tribunal set up in Sierra Leone announced Taylor’s indictment when he was in Ghana in 2002, forcing him to quickly flee a political conference and head home for safety. There have been several long but ultimately successful efforts to arrest fallen political leaders and mass murderers.įor example, Charles Taylor, the former president of Liberia who helped instigate a civil war in neighboring Sierra Leone in the 1990s, is now serving a 50-year prison sentence in the United Kingdom. Rob Keeris/AFP via Getty Images Lessons for Putin Others have argued that Putin could be prosecuted in a Ukrainian court specifically designed for this purpose.įormer Liberian President Charles Taylor appears in court in July 2006 in the Netherlands. In the case of the Ukraine war, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has called for a new international tribunal to prosecute war crimes committed by Russia during the conflict. In other cases, individual countries can use their own courts to prosecute international criminals who have evaded arrest abroad. There are also other, smaller tribunals similar to the ICC that countries have helped set up to focus on specific conflicts. Yet there are a number of options for prosecuting war crimes outside of the ICC that have been used in the past. Other suspects, like Putin, remain at large or have had their charges dropped. Since its inception, the ICC has issued 38 arrest warrants, arrested 21 people, convicted 10 and acquitted four. There are other international criminal courts that prosecute war crimes, but the ICC is the largest and arguably most influential, since 123 member countries fund the court and abide by its rulings. and allies set up to prosecute Nazis at the end of World War II, as part of the Nuremberg Trials. The court is part of a long line of international criminal tribunals going back to the military tribunal the U.S. Jonathan Raa/NurPhoto via Getty Images How international courts workĪ group of 60 countries established the International Criminal Court in 2002 to prosecute people who commit the worst crimes, including genocide and wartime sexual violence, that violate international law. The ICC’s arrest warrant for Vladimir Putin is seen in a news release in March 2023.
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