ABUJA — AN Abuja court on Tuesday gave two Nigerians whose hands were hacked off by Sierra Leonean rebels the go-ahead to serve court papers on former Liberian leader Charles Taylor, through the daily press.
Emmanuel Egbuna and David Anyaele have launched a legal bid to overturn Nigeria’s decision to grant the exiled warlord political asylum in defiance of calls for him to face a UN-backed war crimes tribunal in Sierra Leone.
But the pair have so far been unable to serve court papers on Taylor, who has lived under tight security in a luxury villa in the city of Calabar since fleeing his homeland in August last year. Justice Jonah Adah, sitting in the Federal High Court in Abuja, gave the plaintiffs leave to simply publish the papers in the Nigerian dailies ThisDay and The Guardian and to consider them duly served upon Taylor.
It was not immediately clear whether the amputees would use this method to launch a court summons for Taylor to attend the hearings; a civil suit launched on June 14 to demand a judicial review of his asylum deal. Adah adjourned the hearing until July 26 to allow the plaintiffs to place the newspaper ads and deposit the papers in court houses in Calabar and Abuja.
Taylor is a defendant in the case, along with Nigeria’s President Olusegun Obasanjo, his attorney general and three federal agencies. Taylor was granted asylum last August by President Obasanjo in exchange for him vowing not to interfere in Liberia’s peace process.
The lawyers for the two Nigerians, who formerly lived in Sierra Leone, launched the court battle to force the government to rescind the asylum deal and honour an international arrest warrant targeting Taylor. The former Liberian leader has been accused by international prosecutors at a UN-backed special tribunal in Sierra Leone of backing the rebel Revolutionary United Front (RUF) during that country’s own bloody civil war.
Anyaele and Egbuna were among thousands maimed by the RUF, which war crimes investigators maintain was supported by Taylor between 1991 and 2001 in exchange for a share in Sierra Leone’s trade in so-called “blood diamonds”.
Anyaele’s arms were severed above the elbow, while Egbuna’s hands were partially cut off and left permanently useless.
