Swiss supreme court makes Kosiah’s war-crimes sentence final
Switzerland’s Federal Supreme Court upheld former Liberian rebel commander Alieu Kosiah’s twenty-year prison sentence for war crimes. It overturned his separate conviction for crimes against humanity because that offence entered Swiss law after the acts. Published on Friday, the judgment leaves the war-crimes convictions intact and makes the prison sentence final.
Geopolitics··Morning
War-crimes convictions stand
Switzerland’s Federal Supreme Court upheld the twenty-year prison sentence of Alieu Kosiah, a former commander in Liberia’s civil war, in a judgment published on October 30. The decision preserves his convictions for war crimes committed between 1993 and 1995. The judges overturned a separate conviction for crimes against humanity. That acquittal left the custodial sentence unchanged: the remaining war-crimes convictions continue to carry the maximum prison term imposed in the Swiss proceedings.[1], [2]
The ban on retroactive punishment
The supreme court examined whether the crimes-against-humanity provision could cover actions committed long before it entered Swiss law in 2011. It concluded that applying that offence to Kosiah’s wartime conduct would breach the principle of non-retroactivity. The judgment is dated September 28; Friday was its publication date. The lower court’s appeals chamber had added the crimes-against-humanity conviction in 2023 while also maintaining the twenty-year sentence for war crimes. The highest court’s ruling removes that additional legal basis for conviction.[1]
A case brought in Switzerland
Kosiah commanded fighters in the United Liberation Movement of Liberia for Democracy, a Liberian rebel group. The 2021 judgment found that he ordered or participated in killings, rape, the use of a child soldier and cruel treatment of civilians. Among the killings were those of seventeen civilians and two unarmed soldiers. Liberia’s successive civil wars killed about a quarter of a million people between 1989 and 2003. Kosiah settled in Switzerland in the late nineteen-nineties and was arrested there in 2014. The original verdict also found that he ordered looting, repeatedly ordered or inflicted cruel and humiliating treatment of civilians, and mishandled corpses.[1]
Swiss courts used universal jurisdiction, which allows serious international crimes to be prosecuted even when they occurred abroad. Civitas Maxima, the Swiss organization representing victims, welcomed the final war-crimes conviction. Its director Alain Werner also expressed disappointment at the acquittal on crimes against humanity. The organization described the case as the first war-crimes conviction by a Swiss civilian court and the first anywhere against a Liberian for crimes committed during the country’s civil wars.[1]
