Every Living Thing: Facing Down Terrorists, Warlords, and Thugs in West Africa
Publish date: 15 June 2020
Issue Number: 877
Diary: IBA Legalbrief Africa
Category: General
Every Living Thing: Facing Down Terrorists, Warlords, and Thugs in West Africa
By David Crane
Carolina Academic Press. $27
From 2001 until 2005, David M Crane, the first American since Justice Robert Jackson at Nuremberg in 1945 to be named the Chief Prosecutor of an international war crimes tribunal and one of the most recognisable international criminal lawyers in the world, worked with a team of intrepid investigators to bring down the most powerful warlords in West Africa. Against all odds and at great personal sacrifice forced to live across the world from loved ones and under constant threat from those who would have happily murdered him for his efforts Crane worked tirelessly to unravel a complicated international legal puzzle to become the only person in the modern era to take down a sitting head of state for war crimes and crimes against humanity. Following the creation of Special Court for Sierra Leone in 2002, a small band of lawyers, investigators and paralegals changed the face of international criminal law with their innovative plan to effectively and efficiently deliver justice for the tens of thousands of victims, most of them women and children, in the process bringing down warlord-turned-President Charles Taylor of Liberia, the most wanted man in the world.
