# Charles Taylor President of Liberia from 1997 to 2003, and the first head of state convicted by an international tribunal since Nuremberg. Taylor's NPFL launched the Liberian civil war in 1989 and then supplied the fighters, the rear base and the export channel for the RUF incursion into Sierra Leone on 23 March 1991. He had met [[Foday Sankoh]] training in [[Libya]] in the early 1980s. The mechanism that makes him central to this cluster is **Liberia as a laundering hub**. Liberia's own diamond mining capacity was 100,000–150,000 carats a year. Antwerp's Diamond High Council recorded **over 31 million carats imported from Liberia between 1994 and 1998** — the great majority of it Sierra Leonean. It is the original template for the pattern this vault documents repeatedly: a neighbouring state whose export statistics cannot be explained by its own geology. Rwanda's coltan and gold exports are the same mechanism running today. See [[Rwanda]]. Taylor was indicted by the Special Court for Sierra Leone on **7 March 2003**, arrested in **March 2006**, and transferred to The Hague that June. > [!warning] The conviction is routinely misstated > Taylor was **convicted on 26 April 2012** on all eleven counts of the amended indictment and **sentenced to 50 years on 30 May 2012**, upheld on appeal in September 2013. But the Trial Chamber convicted him of **planning and of aiding and abetting** — and **acquitted him on the joint criminal enterprise and command-responsibility theories**. He was not found to have ordered or commanded the RUF. That is the lesser mode of liability the prosecution sought, and the distinction matters both legally and for what it says about the evidentiary limits of prosecuting sponsorship rather than command. He is serving the sentence in the United Kingdom; his request to serve it in Rwanda was refused. ## See also [[Sierra Leone Civil War]] · [[Foday Sankoh]] · [[Blood Diamonds]] · [[Conflict Resources Atlas]]