Inside Life: Alain Werner, Civitas Maxima

Alain Werner is Director of Civitas Maxima, a not-for-profit Swiss organisation that he set up in September 2012 to find and preserve evidence of war crimes for future prosecution.

Werner began studying law in Geneva under Professor Robert Roth (later Presiding Judge of the Special Tribunal for the Lebanon) just as the discipline of international criminal law was emerging. It became clear to him during his studies that he wanted to pursue a career in the field: "I was dreaming of adventure and still very idealistic – and trying to change the world just a little bit." Werner went on to complete his Masters at Columbia University, under the tutelage of Reed Brody (known as the 'dictator hunter'), after which he says he "got lucky" and was accepted on a Swiss government programme to work on international projects.

The programme took him to the Special Court for Sierra Leone (SCSL) in Freetown, where he became a trial attorney in the team prosecuting three Revolutionary United Front (RUF) commanders following the end of the conflict in 2002. He continued in the programme for three years.

In 2006, former Liberian president Charles Taylor was arrested in exile in Nigeria and handed over to the SCSL, which had previously indicted him. Werner joined the SCSL prosecution team led by Brenda Hollis and Nicholas Koumjian, gathering witness statements and other evidence. Taylor was eventually convicted and, following an unsuccessful appeal, was imprisoned in the UK for a term of 50 years (the UK pledge of a place in one of its prisons in the event of a conviction being secured having been a key element in allowing the trial to proceed).

Between 2008 and 2017, alongside other projects, Werner also worked with Reed Brody on the case of former President of Chad, Hissène Habré, which work culminated in the two year trial of Habré before the Extraordinary African Chambers.

In 2009, he was invited by Karim Khan QC to join a team working for the victims on the "Kaing Guek Eav" or "Duch" case, the first case heard at the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC). This experience cemented Werner's focus on the importance of documentation and preservation of evidence.

From there he moved to London to the Aegis Trust, an organisation dedicated to preventing genocide and mass atrocities worldwide. At Aegis he worked with Hassan Bility, a prominent journalist who had been arrested and tortured under the Taylor regime. Their focus was on crimes that had been committed in Liberia and on working with partners in Sierra Leone to obtain evidence on the trade by Western players of 'blood diamonds'.

"I wanted to work on Liberia because there was total impunity there for the crimes committed," Werner explains. "But we also decided to try to bring accountability to Western players who had made a lot of money out of blood diamonds from Sierra Leone. So we identified some examples of impunity and started to compile cases – but after two years the money ran out."

At that point, Werner decided to set out on his own and, in September 2012, he founded Civitas Maxima in Geneva.

The main challenge in setting out on this course was to find private funding for working in a sphere traditionally regarded as the prerogative of the state. "I did not want to work for the state, or take any money from any government," explains Werner. "I tried to find the money on my own and the problem is that there is always money for those trials of international crimes which are backed by the UN or the ICC, but little or no money available for interviewing victims and finding other evidence before trials can take place. The whole process is a political one run by the international community: there is no 'market' as such."

Werner knew from Reed Brody, who was working at Human Rights Watch at the time, that the organisation did not have funding available for such a project – and indeed that he had identified a gap in the market. "Organisations like Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International do great work writing reports on such crimes," says Werner, "but most of the time they do not go after the actual perpetrators."

Werner was, however, lucky in securing funding early on from Pro Victimis in Geneva (an organisation which provides grants for projects deemed to further its mission of supporting victims of forgotten or unrecognised disasters, including conflicts).

He contacted Bility in Liberia to discuss how best to use this money: his initial plan was to send a Western law graduate out to Liberia to conduct interviews with witnesses. However, Bility persuaded him that the money could be better spent on training 10-15 Liberians to do that work instead. This led to the founding of the Global Justice and Research Project (GJRP) in Monrovia.

Civitas Maxima still collaborates with GJRP and their collaboration, along with that of another partner, the Centre for Accountability and the Rule of Law in Sierra Leone, led by Ibrahim Tommy, has led to a high success rate in achieving the arrests of their subjects. The three organisations focus on crimes committed against victims in Liberia and Sierra Leone. Civitas Maxima also represents victims from the 2011 post-electoral violence in Ivory Coast.

“Everywhere we can we try to collaborate with local organizations and work together to document the crimes. Capacity building is a very important and meaningful part of our mission. So the evidence we collect comes from people who know the ground intimately,” says Werner.

Part of the difficulty in finding funding for cases is, in Werner's view, down to an understandable concern on the part of prospective funders that results may be hard to come by. Not only are the cases themselves very complicated to build but, as an organisation which sits outside the criminal justice apparatus, once it has built a case, Civitas Maxima must then persuade prosecutors to take it on. A significant hurdle in this is showing a sufficient link between the individual in question and a Western jurisdiction.

Civitas Maxima and its partners seek to prosecute in the West because of the risk that trials brought in jurisdictions where the defendants may still have some backing will not be fair in all respects, and there could be significant threats posed to the victims, the witnesses and the local partners. There is therefore a need to establish a valid legal nexus between the individual and the European state in which prosecution is sought.

"The crimes we can pursue are limited because of the issue of jurisdiction," explains Werner. "It is just not sound legally to go after someone without such a nexus and we want to focus our resources on solid legal cases. The nexus we most frequently rely on is the presence of the alleged perpetrator, although there are others like dual nationality of the alleged perpetrator or the victim. So, for example, the Metropolitan Police could arrest Agnes Taylor because she had lived in London since 1997. There are, however, many war criminals in Liberia whom we are not able to proceed against because they never move. Eventually, we hope all our work will compel the Liberian government to carry out reforms and set up war crimes courts in Liberia."

Nevertheless, since 2012, Werner has been able to put the organisation on a firmer financial footing. The organisation is entirely reliant on donations for its funds. Over the years, Werner has managed to convince some of the main funders in the field such as the Oak Foundation and the Sigrid Rausing Trust to fund Civitas Maxima. In 2015, the budget was CHF 610,235 (approximately GBP 478,250); in the following year it increased to CHF 738,407 (around GBP 578,700) – meaning that the organisation was almost in the black at the end of 2016.

Since its establishment in 2012, Civitas Maxima, working with its partners, has achieved some notable successes in building cases for the arrest of individuals suspected of involvement in such crimes.

The first such success was the 2014 arrest and indictment of Martina Johnson, a former commander of the National Patriotic Front of Liberia (NFPL) (the group headed by Charles Taylor) for her implication in mutilation and mass killing committed in Liberia during the first Liberian civil war. This was swiftly followed by the arrest in Switzerland of Alieu Kosiah for suspected involvement in war crimes committed by the United Liberation Movement of Liberia for Democracy (ULIMO) while fighting the NPFL between 1993 and 1995. These were the first ever arrests for war crimes against any commander of either group.

In 2015, the work done by the organisation and its local partner to compile evidence of enslavement and pillage of blood diamonds in Sierra Leone formed the basis of an investigation by the Belgian authorities and the subsequent issuance of a European Arrest Warrant against Michel Desaedeleer, an individual with American and Belgian citizenship. Desaedeleer's arrest was the first case ever brought for international crimes connected to suspected participation in the blood diamond trade (no trial ultimately took place as, shortly before it was due to start, Desaedeleer died in prison in Brussels).

Civitas Maxima also provided the initial information leading to the investigation and arrest in June 2017 of Agnes Reeves Taylor, ex-wife of Charles Taylor, who was arrested by the Metropolitan Police and charged with torture on grounds of her suspected involvement with the NFPL during the first Liberian civil war.

Civitas Maxima focuses on meticulous documentation of crimes rather than advocacy. This arises in part from the lessons Werner took from his time in Cambodia.

"I learned two important lessons from the Cambodia case I was involved with at the ECCC," says Werner. "First, it showed me that, irrespective of how much time passes between the crimes and a trial, the trial is still important to the victims. In this case, thirty years had passed since the crimes in question. Furthermore, we were not representing the direct victims – they had died in the S-21 detention camp – but their relatives. It was a contrast to the previous cases I had worked on where we were speaking directly to the victims: amputees, victims of sexual violence, and others, who had personally suffered. It was a big surprise to me to realise how important justice was to our clients in Phnom Penh, whose own – indirect – suffering was also intense. I had not had much time to reflect on anything in Africa, but I had more time to do so in Cambodia and so in 2009 I decided that I would only ever fight for victims and never do anything else."

The second key lesson related to the vital importance of preserving evidence. In contrast to the largely undocumented evidence in Africa, the Khmer Rouge had recorded their actions – and those records were disappearing. Werner refers to an example described by Nic Dunlop, a journalist who has written extensively on the Khmer Rouge and in 1999 personally tracked down the former head of its secret police, Comrade Duch: once, when buying fried bananas in Phnom Penh, Dunlop realised that the bananas were wrapped in one of the tortured victims' written "confessions" – and that the evidence was literally being thrown away on a daily basis.

Werner's conclusion based on these two lessons was that it was important that crimes come to trial even long after the events in question, and that in order for that to be possible, the evidence of those crimes must be gathered and preserved now.

"The international trials I was involved with were great and very rewarding," he says. "The Khmer Rouge trial of Duch was the first ever trial of communist atrocities in history; the Charles Taylor trial was the first conviction of a head of state in front of an international court since Nuremberg. But in Cambodia I came to the realisation that being on the side of the victims meant that I should document these atrocities, and do so outside politics, even where there is no trial and no justice in sight for the victims. I decided to spend my time doing this, not as before by acting as a lawyer in big international trials, but outside the system with the victims, trying to bring justice to them."

The potential for bringing further cases in Civitas Maxima's three chosen countries of focus will be long-lasting: suspected perpetrators of war crimes or crimes against humanity may be prosecuted for as long as they are alive as there are no statutes of limitation for international crimes under international law. However, Werner says that Civitas Maxima is often asked to start work in other countries, and is considering doing so.

He is also considering extending the scope of its work to advocacy, which is not something it currently undertakes. This is in part to cope with the vast amount of work the organisation has to do over the next 12 – 18 months, which could see the trials of Martina Johnson (in Belgium), Alieu Kosiah (in Switzerland) and Agnes Taylor (in London). A fourth individual is Mohammed Jabbateh, who is accused of immigration fraud and perjury committed when applying for asylum and residency in the US by concealing his past as an officer in the ULIMO. This trial will take place in autumn 2017 in Philadelphia and will garner a lot of interest in Liberia as it coincides with the forthcoming Liberian general election.

Werner sees the increasing volume of work as proof that there is a real need for organisations like Civitas Maxima. "What is interesting is that I always dreamed of bringing cases myself, so I will keep working as long as I am physically able to in order to leave a strong organisation behind, fighting for justice on behalf of the forgotten victims," says Werner. "And I think our success shows that there is a massive need for organisations like Civitas Maxima, which just build cases and document stories. There are not many like us at the moment, but I think in fifty years, there will be many more."