Special Court for Sierra Leone, RUF Trial, Update 30

RUF Trial

Special Court for Sierra Leone

Sierra Leone

English

The prosecution in the RUF case thus far has called a total of 28 witnesses, and the pace of the trial has proved to be considerably slower than the other two trials. This slow pace seems at least partly due to the substantial amount of testimony given by insider witnesses in recent sessions, though it also appears to result from the extensive leeway granted by the bench to crossexamination by defense counsel. As the right to examine prosecution witnesses falls under the rights of the accused, the bench intervenes infrequently, which occasionally allows the defense to continue irrelevant lines of questioning.

This week began with two days of continuing cross-examination of Witness TF1-141, the third former child combatant to be called in the RUF case thus far [1]. Thursday was a Muslim holiday, and the chamber spent the remaining two days of the week in closed session hearing evidence from an insider witness. As this witness had given evidence directly implicating all three accused, the court spent over four days in cross-examination of this witness, amounting to over a full week of court time spent exclusively on the evidence of Witness TF1-141.

This week’s public testimony focused on the roles of the second and third accused within the RUF in operations in the eastern districts of Sierra Leone in 1998. Cross-examination was briefly interrupted as the court adjourned to remove a young boy from the public gallery: the Presiding Judge announced that “we are disturbed about a child like that being present in proceedings like this.” Children younger than twelve years old are not permitted to attend court proceedings.