Liberia: Taylor in Bid to Transfer to Rwandan Prison

19 June 2014
allAfrica.com

Former Liberian president Charles Taylor has launched a bid to serve his prison sentence for war crimes in Rwanda instead of Britain.

The BBC reports that Taylor's lawyers have lodged papers with the Special Court for Sierra Leone claiming that being jailed in Britain breaches his human rights.

He is serving a 50-year term for aiding and abetting war crimes during the civil war in Sierra Leone.

Taylor's lawyer John Jones QC was reported by the BBC to have told a domestic radio station:

"In the eight months that he has been in the UK he has not received a single visit from his wife and children.

"He has minor children. When he was in The Hague on trial, he had regular visits, they came, they saw him, they went back...

"What we are saying is the UK has a duty to ensure family life, not just for him but for his family. It's a clear duty under international law and English domestic law."

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