Summary: | "Set in the steaming jungles of the ravaged West African country Sierra Leone, this book shows how multiple countries were devastated by an international criminal enterprise led by Presidents Muammar Gadhafi of Libya, Charles Taylor of Liberia, and Blasé Compare of Burkina Faso, with an assist from a vast network of terrorists, including Al Qaeda, vying for the control of diamonds. Following the creation of Special Court for Sierra Leone in 2004, a small band of lawyers, investigators, and paralegals changed the face of international criminal law with their innovative plan to effectively and efficiently deliver justice for the tens of thousands of victims, most of them women and children, in the process bringing down warlord-turned-president Charles Taylor of Liberia, the most wanted man in the world. Drawn from the author's personal journals, this book is the first ever detailed account written by a chief prosecutor of an international war crimes tribunal. This book is the first such work to show how the rule of law is more powerful than the rule of the gun-and provides the playbook for accounting for similar horrors elsewhere"--
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