Why Put Charles Taylor on Trial

We are two of Taylor's many victims.

We have a duty to seek justice for the victims of Charles Taylor's crimes.

Nigeria s role in providing a safe haven for Taylor is peculiar.

The list of Taylor s crimes is long, and the evidence against him is overwhelming.

But President Olosugun Obasanjo of Nigeria has, so far, turned a deaf ear to calls to surrender Taylor.

Though it is possible to sympathize with the Ghanaians, who were placed in a very awkward position, the indictment intensified demands for Taylor s removal.

In 2003, while Taylor was under rebel attack, he organized and supported an incursion into Côte d Ivoire.

Taylor s warmongering also paved the way for military coups in Sierra Leone and The Gambia.

Similar pressure must be brought to bear to compel Nigeria to surrender Taylor to the Special Court in Sierra Leone.

The media have fallen back on the old cliché about soap operas, bur neither the prime minsiter nor netizen Tom Taylor were amused

President Mbeki was one of the three heads of state present at the handover ceremony from Taylor to Blah in Monrovia, Liberia's capital.

He may have had more than the departing Taylor in mind when he said, It has indeed been a shameful thing that, as Africans, we have killed ourselves for such a long time.''

The establishment view say, in US Treasury Undersecretary John Taylor's office is that Argentina's collapse is the fault of its politicians.

Taylor is now being tried in The Hague, and, after two decades of horrendous conflict, Liberia is at peace and rebuilding under a democratic government.

Taylor still faces the prospect of trial and, another former dictator, Saddam Hussein, is now on trial before a national court in Iraq.

Charles Taylor, a former president of Liberia currently facing war crimes charges at a special court in The Hague, is alleged to have used diamonds to fund rebels in Sierra Leone s civil war. The case against Taylor represents only one of several examples in which diamonds have facilitated widespread human rights violations.

It is to be hoped that Taylor's departure heralds the beginning of a new African era, in which Africa's rulers stop protecting the continent's dictators because they would rather incur the wrath of faceless citizens than expel a dictator from among their ranks.

But, despite the advent of true democratic elections, Liberia and all of West Africa will be trapped in an unending cycle of violence unless Taylor is put in the dock for war crimes.

President Charles Taylor's resignation from Liberia's presidency and his exile in Nigeria is not only a welcome relief for the war torn land he so misruled, but also perhaps a bellwether for other discredited dictators.

If the GDP gap is 4 , as a recent Congressional Budget Office estimate implied, the Taylor rule would indicate an optimal federal funds rate of about 1.25 (2 1.5 0.25 2), compared to the current rate of only 0.1 .

The best containment strategy is to put Taylor in the custody of the Special Court that indicted him in 2003 for war crimes and crimes against humanity for his role in the war in Sierra Leone.

The women and children whose limbs Taylor ordered to be hacked off bear testimony to his brutality, and the countries left in turmoil make clear that there can be no durable peace in West Africa unless the man who unleashed these conflicts is stopped.

Yet Obasanjo has said that he would release Taylor only to an elected government of Liberia, and many believe that Taylor is waiting it out until his allies are in a position to let him return with no threat of prosecution.