Sir George Desmond Lorenz de Silva, QC , KStJ (13 December 1939 – 2 June 2018) was a British criminal law barrister and international lawyer who served as the United Nations Chief War Crimes Prosecutor in Sierra Leone.
Desmond de Silva was of Sri Lankan, English, and Scottish descent, and comes from a family of lawyers. He was the son of Fredrick de Silva MBE, formerly Ceylon's ambassador to France and Switzerland, and his wife Esme Gregg de Silva; [1] a grandson of George E. de Silva; and a second cousin of Lasantha Wickrematunge. [2]
Educated at Dulwich College Preparatory School, London, and Trinity College, Kandy, Sri Lanka, de Silva trained as a barrister at the Middle Temple, London. [1]
De Silva was called to the bar from the Middle Temple in 1964, and was appointed a Queen's Counsel in 1984. [1] A member of the Criminal Bar Association and the International Association of Prosecutors, he became one of the highest-profile criminal Queen's Counsel in England. In 2002, the UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan appointed him as Deputy Prosecutor for the Special Court for Sierra Leone, at the level of an Assistant Secretary-General, and in 2005 promoted him to the post of Chief Prosecutor at the higher level of Under Secretary-General. Silva brought about the arrest of Charles Taylor, former President of Liberia, who was convicted of war crimes at the Hague in 2011.
In 2003, de Silva was sent as an envoy by the United Nations Development Programme to Belgrade to persuade Prime Minister Vojislav Kostunica and his government to surrender indicted war criminals. He became a senior associate member of St Antony's College, Oxford, and a Bencher of the Honourable Society of the Middle Temple. [1] De Silva's legal expertise included war crimes, crimes against humanity, espionage, treason, drugs, terrorism, human rights, white-collar fraud and sports law. His clients included John Terry, Lee Bowyer, Buzz Aldrin, [3] Harry Redknapp, Ron Atkinson, Hans Segers, Lawrence Dallaglio, Graham Rix and Jamie Osborne. De Silva was a member of the Governing Council of the Manorial Society. [4]
In October 2011, with the approval of Prime Minister David Cameron, de Silva was appointed to head a Review into collusion by the security services and other agencies of the state into the 1989 murder of the high-profile Belfast lawyer Pat Finucane. The report was published on 12 December 2012, and acknowledged "a willful and abject failure by successive Governments"; [5] [6] however, Finucane's family called the de Silva report a "sham". [7] In 2019 the Supreme Court ruled that the official investigation into the Finucane murder was ineffective and failed to meet the required human rights standards. [8]
On 23 July 2010, he was appointed [9] by the United Nations Human Rights Council to investigate Israel's interception of a Gaza-bound flotilla in international waters that led to 9 deaths. In 2014, he was Chairman of an Inquiry into torture and executions of detainees in Syria. The Report produced went before the Geneva 11 Peace Talks into the civil war in Syria. On 10 January 2016, a Senior Army Commander complained about a "witch hunt" against British soldiers who were Iraq War veterans by pursuing frivolous legal claims. De Silva agreed with the Army Chief by saying, "Up to now nobody has got these ambulance-chasing lawyers by the scruff of the neck." [10]
He married Princess Katarina of Yugoslavia on 5 December 1987. She was the daughter of Prince Tomislav of Yugoslavia and Princess Margarita of Baden, a granddaughter of King Alexander I of Yugoslavia and the great-great-great-granddaughter of Queen Victoria. They had one daughter, Victoria Marie Esmé Margarita, born on 6 September 1991. They divorced on 6 May 2010. [11] He had one sister, Helga de Silva, whose son Detmar Blow was married to the late Isabella Blow.
Sir Desmond de Silva died on 2 June 2018 after a stroke following elective heart surgery in November 2017. [3]
De Silva was knighted in the 2007 New Year Honours, and was also a Knight of the Most Venerable Order of Saint John [1] and a Knight Commander of the Royal Order of Francis I.[ citation needed ] He was sworn in as a Member of the Privy Council of the United Kingdom in October 2011. [12] On 22 August 2016, Alexander, Crown Prince of Yugoslavia awarded him with the Grand Cross of the Order of the White Eagle. [13]
Patrick Finucane was an Irish lawyer who specialised in criminal defence work. Finucane came to prominence due to his successful challenge of the British government in several important human rights cases during the 1980s. He was killed by loyalist paramilitaries from the Ulster Defence Association (UDA), acting in collusion with British security services. In 2011, the British Prime Minister, David Cameron, met with Pat Finucane's family and apologised for the collusion.
David Michael Crane is an American lawyer who was the Chief Prosecutor of the Special Court for Sierra Leone (SCSL) from April 2002 until July 15, 2005. During his tenure, he indicted, among others, the then-President of Liberia, Charles Taylor. Crane was replaced as chief prosecutor by his deputy Desmond de Silva. On April 26, 2012, the SCSL, sitting in The Hague, convicted Taylor on various charges. Crane served as Professor of Practice at Syracuse University College of Law from 2006 until 2018.
Geoffrey Ronald Robertson is an Australian-British barrister, academic, author and broadcaster. Robertson is a founder and joint head of Doughty Street Chambers. He serves as a Master of the Bench at the Middle Temple, a recorder, and visiting professor at Queen Mary University of London.
The Order of the White Eagle was a state order in the Kingdom of Serbia (1883–1918) and the Kingdom of Yugoslavia (1918–1945).
Karim Asad Ahmad Khan is a British lawyer specialising in international criminal law and international human rights law, who has served as Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court since 2021.
Farid Raymond Anthony is a Sierra Leonean writer, author and poet. He was born in Freetown, Sierra Leone to parents of Lebanese descent. Farid Anthony has written several books, including Stories from Sierra Leone (ISBN 0948193905), and Sawpit Boy.
Stephen J. Rapp is an American lawyer and the former United States ambassador-at-large for war crimes issues in the Office of Global Criminal Justice.
The Sunday Leader was an English-language Sri Lankan weekly newspaper published by Leader Publications (Private) Limited. It was founded in 1994 and is published from Colombo. Its sister newspapers are the Iruresa (Irudina) and the defunct The Morning Leader. Founded by brothers Lasantha Wickrematunge and Lal Wickrematunge, the newspaper is known for its outspoken and controversial news coverage. The newspaper and its staff have been attacked and threatened several times and its founding editor Lasantha Wickrematunge was assassinated.
Lasantha Manilal Wickrematunge was a high-profile Sri Lankan journalist, politician, broadcaster and human rights activist who was assassinated in January 2009.
Sir Geoffrey Nice KC is a British barrister and judge. He took part in the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia and was lead prosecutor at Slobodan Milošević's trial. He is chair of the China Tribunal and the Uyghur Tribunal, which have investigated human rights abuses in China.
Brenda J. Hollis is an American lawyer. She was appointed by United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon as Prosecutor of the Special Court for Sierra Leone in February 2010, replacing Stephen Rapp. Hollis was the Chief Prosecutor at the Special Court and served as the lead prosecutor in the trial and appeal of the case against Charles Taylor, the former President of Liberia. Hollis previously served as the Prosecutor of the Residual Special Court for Sierra Leone, which replaced the Special Court in December 2013; currently James Johnson, an adjunct professor at Case Western Reserve University School of Law, serves as the Chief Prosecutor for the Residual Special Court for Sierra Leone. She also serves as the Reserve International Co-Prosecutor for the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia, and works as a consultant in international criminal law and procedure.
Sir Howard Andrew Clive Morrison, is a British lawyer and from 2011 to 2021 a Judge of the International Criminal Court based in The Hague, Netherlands. Currently UK advisor on war crimes to the Ukrainian Prosecutor General.
Sir Geoffrey Lionel Bindman KC (Hon) is a British solicitor specialising in human rights law, and founder of the human rights law firm Bindman & Partners. He has been Chair of the British Institute of Human Rights since 2005. He won The Law Society Gazette Centenary Award for Human Rights in 2003, and was knighted in 2007 for services to human rights. In 2011, he was appointed Queen's Counsel.
James Kirkpatrick Stewart is a Canadian lawyer with over thirty years of experience as Crown counsel handling criminal trials and appeals for the prosecution, including more than eight years working with the United Nations in international criminal law prosecutions as a trial and appellate counsel and legal manager. Stewart was nominated by Fatou Bensouda, Prosecutor for the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague, as one of three candidates for election to the post of ICC Deputy Prosecutor (Prosecution). He was duly elected by the Assembly of States Parties on 16 November 2012 for a period of nine years. Mr Stewart was sworn in on 8 March 2013 and as Deputy Prosecutor of the ICC, he will report directly to the Prosecutor.
George Edmund de Silva was a Ceylonese lawyer and politician. He was the first Cabinet Minister of Industries, Industrial Research and Fisheries in independent Sri Lanka (1947–1948), a Member of Parliament and State Council.
Edmund Fredrick Lorenz de Silva, (1912–1993) was a Ceylonese lawyer and politician. He was the Mayor of Kandy, Member of Parliament and Sri Lanka's Ambassador to France.
Michael Benedict Emmerson CBE KC is a British barrister, specialising in public international law, human rights and humanitarian law, and international criminal law. From 2011 to 2017, he was the UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights and Counter-Terrorism. Emmerson is currently an Appeals Chamber Judge of the UN Mechanism for International Criminal Tribunals sitting on the Criminal Tribunals for the Former Yugoslavia and Rwanda. He has previously served as Special Adviser to the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, and Special Adviser to the Appeals Chamber of the ECCC.
The 2014 Syrian detainee report, also known as the Caesar Report, formally titled A Report into the credibility of certain evidence with regard to Torture and Execution of Persons Incarcerated by the current Syrian regime, is a report that claims to detail "the systematic killing of more than 11,000 detainees by the Syrian government in one region during the Syrian Civil War over a two and half year period from March 2011 to August 2013". It was released on 21 January 2014, a day before talks were due to begin at the Geneva II Conference on Syria, and was commissioned by the government of Qatar. Qatar has been a key funder of the rebels in Syria. The Syrian government questioned the report due to its ties to hostile sides against the Syrian government and pointed to how many of the photos were identified as casualties among international terrorists fighting the Syrian government or Syrian army troops or civilians massacred by them due to supporting the Syrian government.
Lasantha Wickrematunge, a Sri Lankan journalist, politician and human rights activist, was fatally shot and assassinated in Colombo, Sri Lanka on January 8, 2009. It is believed that he was killed due to his journalistic work critical of Sri Lankan politicians. His murder was widely condemned across the world. The Government of Sri Lanka also expressed shock at the killing, pledging to do everything in its power to catch his killers.
Caoilfhionn Gallagher KC is an Irish-born barrister at Doughty Street Chambers in London, specialising in human rights and civil liberties.
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