By The New York Times (Europe) | Created at 2024-09-29 09:08:02 | Updated at 2024-09-30 05:21:24
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The human rights barrister Geoffrey Robertson argues that even a trial in absentia would have impact and could vindicate international law.
Sept. 29, 2024, 5:01 a.m. ET
This article is from a special report on the Athens Democracy Forum in association with The New York Times.
HM Prison Frankland is a maximum-security prison in northeastern England with an infamous inmate: Charles Taylor, Liberia’s former president. He is serving a 50-year sentence there for “aiding and abetting as well as planning some of the most heinous and brutal crimes recorded in human history” during the decade-long civil war in Sierra Leone that began in 1991.
One lawyer played a crucial role in Mr. Taylor’s conviction: Geoffrey Robertson, a British Australian human rights barrister. He helped set up the Special Court for Sierra Leone (established by the government of Sierra Leone and the United Nations) and sat on it as an appeal judge.
Mr. Robertson is now going after a far more powerful leader: the Russian president, Vladimir V. Putin. In a new book, “The Trial of Vladimir Putin,” Mr. Robertson — a speaker at this week’s Athens Democracy Forum — demands that Mr. Putin be prosecuted for his February 2022 invasion of Ukraine, on the grounds of aggression: one state using armed force against the sovereignty, integrity or independence of another.
“Putin’s truculence and his nuclear power make his actual trial unlikely in the foreseeable future,” Mr. Robertson admits in the book. So he suggests that Mr. Putin be tried in absentia — “if the alternative is to have no trials at all.”
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Mr. Robertson was a law student at the University of Sydney when he first became interested in human rights law. He wrote a study on the unfairness and prejudice that the Aboriginal community faced under English law.
