The thing that strikes me the most about the above photo is Charles Taylor’s cuff links. Golden and in the shape of the continent of Africa, one might take that to be a bold accessory for a man who’s about to be sentenced in an international court for war crimes ranging from slavery to murder to rape to the use of child soldiers — all in his native Liberia and neighboring Sierra Leone. (You may have been spurred on to find out more about Taylor’s crimes after hearing Kanye West not mention them in the lyrics of a song called “Diamonds from Sierra Leone.” Nice video, though.)
Taylor is the former Liberian war criminal who seized the presidency in that African nation in the late nineties, and who in April became the first head of state convicted of war crimes in an international court since Nazis at the Nuremberg trials. (Melissa broke down his conviction on April 29 in a Teachable Moment, which you can see below.)
Today, the 64-year-old Taylor received a 50-year prison term, so he’ll likely do just what our headline says above:
Presiding Judge Richard Lussick says the crimes Taylor was convicted of were of the “utmost gravity in terms of scale and brutality.”
“The lives of many more innocent civilians in Sierra Leone were lost or destroyed as a direct result of his actions,” Lussick said.









