By Mustapha Sesay
The Department of Mass Communication, Fourah Bay College and the Centre for International Media Analysis, Research and Consultancy, University of Bedfordshire, United Kingdom on Wednesday hosted one-day seminar on the social and legal impact of the trials of the UN-backed Special Court for Sierra Leone on the peoples of Liberia and Sierra Leone.
Chairperson of the seminar, Bernadette Cole who is also the Co-Director of the British Academy funded research project said that the project aimed at the development of a scholarship that would analyze the impact of war crimes trials in both Sierra Leone and Liberia. She said that a similar seminar had been organized in Monrovia.
In his presentation on the media and transitional justice, Magistrate Binneh Kamara, Lecturer at the Department of Mass Communication and a PhD student of the University of Bedfordshire said that very little academic research had been done to gauge the impact of media coverage on the democratic processes in both Sierra Leone and Liberia. He said that when journalists and propagandists put out “hate speeches” on their various media outlets, that had the propensity to plunge any country into conflict as was the case in Rwanda.
In his keynote address, former Deputy Prosecutor of the Special Court for Sierra Leone and current head of the Anti-Corruption Commission, Joseph Fitzgerald Karama said that one of the most significant developments in the field of international criminal law was the establishment of the Special Court because of its hybrid structure and the fact that it was situated in the country where the crimes took place.
Kamara said that prior to the establishing of the Court, child recruitment into war combat was never a crime but that the court made it so, adding that many people had since been charged for such a crime in the International Criminal Court. He however pointed out that because of the uniqueness of some of the rules of the Special Court, domesticating those rules into the country’s justice system would be difficult.
Two plenary sessions followed the opening ceremony during which several presentations were made on the legacies of the Special Court; the wider legal implications of the trials on the two countries, on civil society as well as the challenges and successes of the media’s coverage of the trials, among other topics.
