Switzerland's supreme court has upheld a maximum 20-year prison sentence for former Liberian rebel commander Alieu Kosiah, cementing a landmark war-crimes ruling while throwing out a separate conviction for crimes against humanity on strict legal grounds. The Federal Supreme Court ruled that because crimes against humanity were only incorporated into Swiss law in 2011, the charge could not be applied retroactively to atrocities committed during the 1990s.
The decision concludes a prolonged legal saga that began when Swiss authorities arrested Kosiah in 2014, years after he settled in the country in the late 1990s. In 2021, the Federal Criminal Court convicted the former United Liberation Movement of Liberia for Democracy commander of numerous atrocities carried out between 1993 and 1995 during the first of Liberia's back-to-back civil wars. An appeals chamber reaffirmed the 20-year sentence in 2023 and added the groundbreaking conviction for crimes against humanity—the first such finding in Swiss judicial history.
Switzerland tried Kosiah under universal jurisdiction, a principle enabling domestic courts to prosecute core international crimes regardless of where the acts occurred. The high court affirmed his guilt for violating the laws of war, confirming findings that he ordered or participated in the killings of 17 civilians and two unarmed soldiers, as well as rape, the deployment of a child soldier, looting, and the cruel treatment of civilians and corpses. However, judges held that the legal principle of non-retroactivity barred prosecutors from applying a statute created long after the events took place.
Advocates for victims expressed mixed emotions over the split outcome. Swiss legal organization Civitas Maxima highlighted that the ruling makes final the first war-crimes conviction handed down by a Swiss civilian court, as well as the first conviction anywhere of a Liberian for wartime atrocities. Alain Werner, the organization's director and legal representative for the victims, welcomed the finality of the sentence for survivors while voicing deep disappointment over the dropped charge, maintaining that the systematic violence in Lofa County reflected the very definition of a crime against humanity.