On May 2, 2024, Liberian President Joseph Boakai signed an executive order establishing a UN-backed war crimes tribunal. This historic achievement marks the culmination of years of advocacy in Liberia and abroad to create a forum to investigate and prosecute serious violations of human rights and humanitarian law that occurred during Liberia’s two civil wars, which ended more than two decades ago.
President Boakai’s goal of “bringing about a just, healing and reconciled resolution to the issues of an ugly past” is a noble one. Thankfully, Liberia and its international allies will not reinvent the wheel. If the Liberian tribunal is established based on the draft statute prepared by the country’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, it will be largely a replica of other hybrid tribunals established in post-conflict areas around the world, especially in Liberia’s sister country, Sierra Leone. As with all hybrid tribunals, the hope is that the delivery of justice in geographic, political and social proximity to victims and society at large will foster a sustainable culture of accountability, democracy and respect for human rights.
The Special Court for Sierra Leone (SCSL) has set a solid institutional precedent for the work of the Liberian courts, and high hopes are held for the legacy it will leave in Sierra Leone, especially in terms of “raised expectations” at the society level regarding human rights standards. However, the Liberian courts must learn from the failures and shortcomings of the SCSL as well as its successes. In particular, they must acknowledge the SCSL’s institutional failure to give legal or moral weight to crimes committed against persons with disabilities during the country’s conflict, and the resulting failure of Sierra Leoneans with disabilities to fully enjoy the expressive value of the law. Doing so necessarily means building a court in Liberia that will develop in a disability-sensitive manner from the outset. This is something that lawyers and politicians in Monrovia, and their advisors and partners in Washington and the UN, must pay attention to.
The Liberian Civil War and the Experiences of People with Disabilities Today
The 14 years between December 1989, when Charles Taylor’s National Patriotic Front of Liberia launched its attack on Samuel Doe’s totalitarian state, and August 2003, when Taylor resigned as president and fled to Nigeria, saw almost uninterrupted conflict, with gross and vicious violence against unarmed civilians commonplace. While deliberate amputations were not as common in the Liberian war as in Sierra Leone, the physical and mental injuries suffered by civilians have led to a disproportionate increase in the disabled population after the war. In addition to those disabilities that existed before the war, the violence experienced between 1989 and 2003 created many disabilities that the Truth and Reconciliation Commission calls “war-induced disorders”, including trauma-related drug addiction. Today, it is estimated that around 20% of Liberia’s population is disabled.
As Janine Natalia Clark has recently argued, while most transitional justice efforts tend to ignore the unique historical and ongoing challenges faced by people with disabilities, Liberia’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) made a clear and concerted effort to address the particular plight of people with disabilities during the conflict. Appendix VIII of its final report, published in 2009, was in fact dedicated to “delineating the ‘disadvantaged’ and their psychosocial needs” in Liberia’s post-war socio-political context.
Unfortunately, this inclusive approach to Liberia has not translated into national inclusion and the realization of rights for people with disabilities. All Liberians continue to face numerous challenges, including poverty, high illiteracy rates, and extremely limited access to safe drinking water and health care, but these issues disproportionately burden people with disabilities. For example, the Liberia Disability Organization estimates that 99 percent of people with disabilities live in extreme poverty (less than US$1.90 a day). Austin Moan Barrio, a Liberian with a disability, said, “The country is lagging behind and no consideration is being given to people with disabilities when rebuilding rural roads and public and private buildings.” [and] There are no “recreation centers,” let alone socio-economic policies.
The invisibility of disability at the Special Court for Sierra Leone
The Liberian War Crimes Tribunal has the potential to build on the good work of the TRC, put disability on the national political agenda and eradicate disability stigma among the population at large. The establishment of the Tribunal therefore promises to make Liberia a better place for people with disabilities, and a stark departure from the post-war experience of its northwestern neighbor.
While it would be an oversimplification to lump the Liberia and Sierra Leone wars together, their ordeals are clearly intertwined, especially since both conflicts involved many actors (most notably former Liberian President Charles Taylor, who was convicted in the SCSL in 2009 and is currently serving a 50-year sentence). However, despite similarities, Liberia and Sierra Leone’s post-war experiences are very different. While Liberia has not prosecuted anyone for serious crimes committed during the armed conflict, the Sierra Leonean government pushed for the establishment of a hybrid tribunal long before the war officially ended in January 2002.
Criticisms of the SCSL are numerous. However, among the Court’s successes are its contribution to amplifying the war narrative and developing a culture of human rights in Sierra Leone, particularly in promoting women’s issues and children’s rights. This represents the expressive value of transitional justice law. Valerie Oosterfeld, for example, has written about the powerful impact the Court’s precedents have had on the status of women in Sierra Leone:
“By labelling the gender-based violence suffered by women and girls as forced marriage, marital bondage and sexual slavery, and by labelling rape perpetrated against women, girls, men and boys as a criminal act, these violations have been officially and internationally recognised as wrongdoing.”
The result has been an official (albeit not widely welcomed) change in attitude: As First Lady Fatima Maada Bio recently explained, “In Sierra Leone, our mindset has shifted from accepting the status quo to saying, ‘No, we cannot allow this to continue in our country.'”
But this trend towards respecting human rights did not extend to people with disabilities. I have written previously about the failure of SCSL prosecutors, judges, and advisors to address violence against people with disabilities during this conflict. Take, for example, the January 1999 attack on Kissy Mental Home, known to most SCSL witnesses as “Crazy Yard.” The facility was home to about 400 residents. At the time, Freetown was under the control of ECOMOG, a Nigerian-led peacekeeping force. Around January 6, Revolutionary United Front (RUF) rebels established a base inside Kissy Mental Home. From there, they launched “Operation No Living Thing” (also known as Operation Cut Hand), a particularly brutal attack on the city’s civilians that Human Rights Watch described as “the most intense and concentrated period of human rights violations in Sierra Leone’s eight-year civil war.”
Operation No Living Thing played a central role in the Brima case. The three defendants, Alex Tamba Brima, Ibrahim Badji Kamara and Santigie Bolbol Kam, were commanders of the AFRC/RUF coalition that was based at the Kissy Mental Home at the time. According to prosecution witness George Johnson Jr.:
“On arrival at Kissi psychiatric hospital, orders were given: as we were withdrawing, soldiers from Santigie Kanu were to proceed to east Freetown and amputate up to 200 civilians and send them to Ferry Junction.”
The Court found all three defendants responsible under the Superior Court Liability Act for various atrocities that occurred during the Freetown attack, including the reckless attack on civilians and the murder of eight nuns at Kissi psychiatric hospital.
The court’s focus on the Kissy psychiatric hospital raid was exclusively on the broader community around Kissy and on these (presumably non-disabled) nuns. However, it is absurd that the soldiers, especially those tasked with the indecent acts described by Johnson, did not also harm the residents themselves. Indeed, as George Packer of The New Yorker pointed out, the facility itself became a “central mutilation zone” during this period. No target is more likely to be a victim than someone chained to their bed and unable to defend themselves, as was the case at the facility until 2018. Unfortunately, we will never know how many of Kissy’s disabled residents were killed or seriously injured in the raid, simply because it was not a priority for SCSL investigators, prosecutors, or judges.
Learning from the failure of the Special Court
It is no exaggeration to say that the invisibility of disability in the SCSL has had a knock-on effect on the experiences of persons with disabilities in post-war Sierra Leone. As the courts did not accord any importance to the lives of persons with disabilities, the disability group did not enjoy the expressive value of the law, unlike other segments of Sierra Leonean society. As a result, despite significant strides towards inclusion at the policy level, persons with disabilities in Sierra Leone continue to face obstacles and barriers in all aspects of their lives, mainly due to stigma and discrimination.
The Liberian War Crimes Tribunal must ensure that it learns from the successes of the SCSL as well as its failures. Fortunately, the Liberian courts are in a much better position to promote the rights and dignity of persons with disabilities than any hybrid tribunal to date, and perhaps even better than the International Criminal Court, thanks to the disability-sensitive approach of the Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities and a wealth of recent work harmonizing international criminal law and international humanitarian law with the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (which Liberia ratified in 2012).
There is still much to be done for persons with disabilities in Liberia, and more broadly in the field of international criminal law and transitional justice. The Liberian War Crimes Tribunal has the potential to lead the world in justice against violence against this group of people, just as the Special Tribunals for Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia have done against sexual and gender-based violence, and the Special Tribunal for Sierra Leone against forced marriage and the use of child soldiers. In doing so, it would counter an unacceptable trend in law that gives little regard to the rights and dignity of persons with disabilities.
