The Swiss Federal Criminal Court’s appeals chamber in the southern city of Bellinzona upheld as well as a sentence of 20 years behind bars.
For the first time in Swiss history, the court also handed down a verdict of crimes against humanity after prosecutors expanded the indictment to include the charge in the appeal process.
What was the case about?
Kosiah was found guilty of war crimes by Switzerland’s Federal Criminal Court in June 2021 due to multiple atrocities in the first of Liberia’s back-to-back civil wars.
Judges in Switzerland’s first-ever war crimes trial found him “guilty of violating the laws of war” alongside charges of rape, murder and cannibalism.
It was the first time in the world a Liberian was convicted of war crimes committed during the conflict.
Kosiah settled in in 1998 and was arrested in 2014. He appealed against that verdict, pleading his innocence and demanding an acquittal.
However, the appeals chamber backed the earlier court decision and agreed that, after serving his sentence, the now 48-year-old should be deported and barred from re-entering Switzerland for 10 years.
Notably, it agreed with the prosecutor and plaintiffs’ charge that his actions deserved the more serious tag of crimes against humanity.
Kosiah is the first person to be convicted of that charge in Switzerland, where such a conviction only became possible after a legal change in 2011.
Brutality followed by impunity
Liberia’s civil wars are infamous for their brutality and the use of child soldiers. They left an estimated 250,000 people dead in the country between 1989 and 2003.
The First Liberian Civil War started in 1989 when politician and started an uprising to topple President Samuel Doe’s military regime. Doe was mutilated and then murdered in an execution that his killers filmed.
Kosiah’s involvement in the conflict primarily occurred during the first war, fighting on Taylor’s side.
Taylor was elected as Liberia’s leader in 1997 after a peace deal, but a second conflict erupted two years later.
The second conflict from 1999 to 2003 that ended with Taylor escaping to Nigeria.
Taylor was convicted of war crimes and crimes against humanity by an international UN-backed court in the Dutch capital, The Hague, in 2012. However, that was over atrocities committed in neighboring Sierra Leone, which also because embroiled in conflict, and not in his own country.
Unlike Sierra Leone, which later held war crimes trials, and some warlords still hold prominent roles in society.
rc/dj (AFP, Reuters)
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