Charles Forelle of the Wall Street Journal interviewed a human rights lawyer about a question I had raised earlier: What would have happened if Naomi Campbell refused to come to The Hague?
“If she had said, ‘I don’t have any legal obligation to come and I’m not coming,’ I think that’s the last we would have heard of this,” says William Schabas, a professor of human-rights law at the National University of Ireland, Galway, and a leading authority on international criminal law.
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So it’s fairly clear that if Ms. Campbell were filming a Dunkin’ Donuts commercial in Freetown, the Sierra Leonean capital, and the judges ordered her to be brought to the Freetown courtroom, the local authorities would have to drag her in, says Prof. Schabas.
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The U.N. and Sierra Leone alone established the court, he points out. The court has rules that include contempt proceedings, but there’s no clear reason why countries not party to the agreement are bound by those rules.
A U.N. Security Council resolution is cited by prosecutors in their motion for a subpoena, but the resolution’s language is pretty soft. It merely “encourages” countries to make witnesses “promptly” available.
There’s an update at the bottom of theWSJ piece that gives a reasonable rationale for appearing even in the absence of a compelling legal obligation:
**UPDATE: Ms. Campbell’s lawyer, Gideon Benaim, makes the point that even if there “may have been the option of staying away” and hoping local authorities of whatever country Ms. Campbell happened to be in didn’t enforce a warrant to detain her, who wants to take that chance? That could see Ms. Campbell jailed while lawyers squabbled over the Special Court’s jursidiction. That’s “not something anyone would wish would happen,” Mr. Benaim said, while stressing Ms. Campbell didn’t want to testify. Bottom line, he added, when a “legitimate court” issues a subpoena, “you take that very seriously, and you come.”**
Campbell might also have feared for her image, calculating that it would look worse to flout the subpoena (enforceable or not) and withhold testimony if Farrow and White were going to testify. I’m not sure she does come away looking better given her clear reluctance to testify, but she did answer questions directly and didn’t dissemble, preferring to say, “I can’t recall.”
Thanks, Trevor. I think Campbell seriously considered not testifying, and this is just her lawyer trying to make it sound like she’s a decent person. But I take your point that she answered questions directly.