Charles Taylor completes the dismal triptych already comprised of Slobodan Milosevic and Saddam Hussein. As with the Former Yugoslav and Iraqi leaders, so too Liberia’s erstwhile head of state stands trial for international crimes. The indictments that hold all three autocrats to account for atrocity are fashioned from the same legal standards: Taylor is arraigned before the Special Court of Liberia's neighbour, Sierra Leone, charged on 11 counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity. But, while all are brought to justice, the several courtrooms that hear the cases represent very different venues and prosecutory visions. After serial misadventures – the trials of Milosevic and Saddam both ended in macabre fiasco – does this third forum risk a three-fold disappointment of international criminal justice?

Only in the case against Taylor is the Special Court convened for convenience at the premises of the International Criminal Court in The Hague. His alleged crimes number responsibility for terrorism, murder, rape, sexual slavery, cruel treatment and outrages upon personal dignity. Together they form a vicious tableau of the organised depravity of Sierra Leone’s diamond-crazed regional war. The prosecutor intends to show how, upon orders of Taylor, the civilian population of Sierra Leone was systematically terrorised: homes looted and razed, communities sexually and physically assaulted. The indictment will also bring to the fore for the first time in an international court the enlistment of child soldiers and use of forced labour.

Milosevic was tried by the United Nations International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague. He died before a verdict was reached. Saddam was heard and hung by the Iraqi High Tribunal behind the ramparts of Baghdad’s Green Zone. Like Taylor, they had their exterminatory policies condemned and prosecuted as criminal plots, not explained away as aberrant politics. But this common premise apart, Taylor, Milosevic and Saddam are confronted by institutionalised rivals. The Special Court for Sierra Leone, the ICTY and the Iraqi High Tribunal embody a rhetorically complementary but realistically competitive future for international criminal justice.

As an emanation of a Security Council resolution, the ICTY is supposedly lent the formidable powers of its patron. But before Nato imposed the Dayton settlement and the European Union made co-operation a precondition of its favours, the ICTY was long a sideshow to the vicious and prismatic war in the Balkans. The Baghdad court constituted to try Saddam and his henchmen possessed a less august provenance. The Iraqi High Tribunal’s charter was promulgated by the Governing Council of Iraq – a proxy of the Anglo-American occupying entity, the Coalition Provisional Authority. No amount of latter-day local endorsement has remedied the perception of defective authenticity.

Not unlike the Iraqi High Tribunal, the Special Court for Sierra Leone was constituted in the absence of a dedicated United Nations tribunal. After Yugoslavia and Rwanda, there were only half-hearted calls to establish another potentially remote and ponderous Security Council court for Sierra Leone. Instead, Freetown, the capital of Sierra Leone, is home to the internationally backed Special Court, established by treaty agreement between the Sierra Leone Government and the United Nations. The power to appoint judges is split between the court's two parents.

Under this arrangement the Special Court was expected to embody the local application of international laws. Yet, last year, after his Nigerian asylum was revoked, the UN Security Council resolved that if Taylor’s trial took place in Freetown it would be “an impediment to stability and a threat to the peace of Liberia and of Sierra Leone and to international peace and security in the region”. After the conclusion of agreements with co-hosts, the Netherlands and the International Criminal Court, the latter’s court house in The Hague was put at the disposal of the Special Court. Is the transfer of Taylor’s trial to The Hague an admission of failure or welcome flexibility? The Special Court is statutorily seated in Sierra Leone, with the authority to relocate if needs be. In this prerogative, it is akin to the ICTY, the International Criminal Court and the Iraqi High Tribunal. Though it is a prerogative that none of these other courts have thought fit to use.

Neither the ICTY nor the Iraqi High Tribunal have demonstrated a conspicuous nation-building vocation, nor a talent for standard-setting. The Iraqi High Tribunal has proved no path-finder for the rule of law nor emboldening civil society. The ICTY has not been the hoped-for force for reconciliation in the Former Yugoslavia. Neither the ICTY, nor the Iraqi High Tribunal have evidenced a sense of certainty and place. The compelling case can be made that these courts would have better served their purpose by being sited somewhere else: the ICTY in the now peaceable Balkans, the Iraqi High Tribunal distant from the daily violence in Baghdad.

Confidently carrying on trials in both Sierra Leone and The Hague, the Special Court is informed less by its modern brethren than by its historic forbear, Nuremberg. Other cities were on the shortlist for the Four-Power International Military Tribunal to try the Nazi elite for war crimes. Berlin was, optimistically, the court’s “permanent” seat. Yet, amid the surrounding destruction, Nuremberg had a salvageable courthouse and was securely within the American occupied zone. Though bombed and blackened, it was already accustomed to spectacle and symbolism as the longtime host of the Nazi Party’s annual rally. It was a serendipitous choice. The Nuremberg trials achieved lasting resonance by being held at the erstwhile site of Nazism’s celebratory injustice. Boldly transferring the Special Court trial of Taylor to the International Criminal Court's facilities is an empowering twinning of Sierra Leone and the world seat of international criminal justice, The Hague. Bolder still would be some future move by the International Criminal Court to occasionally relocate its hearings to the distant communities of victims and witnesses it is entrusted to serve.

The author is legal adviser to the Civil Division European Office of the US Department of Justice. This is a personal view.

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