Your second place to come to for news of use to international Switzerland
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— The appeal trial against former lieutenant–colonel and spokesperson Gibril Massaquoi of the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) – a Sierra Leonean group that had close ties with Charles Taylor – began on 10 January in Turku, Finland. In April 2022, a lower court had dismissed charges against Massaquoi for war crimes and crimes against humanity, including homicide, sexual violence, and the recruitment of child soldiers, arguing "reasonable doubt" that he took part in those acts.
The appeal trial is set to continue in Liberia on 6 February and will probably go until June. Civitas Maxima and its Liberian sister NGO, the Global Justice and Research Project, had submitted the initial information about Massaquoi's alleged involvement to the Finnish authorities.
Meanwhile, a Liberian former rebel commander is seeking to overturn Switzerland's first–ever war crimes ruling. Alieu Kosiah, former United Liberation Movement of Liberia for Democracy (ULIMO) commander was convicted to twenty years in prison in June 2021 by the Swiss Federal Criminal Court for war crimes, which included, ordering and committing the murder of civilians, rape and cannibalism, during the first Liberian civil war that ran between 1989 and 1997. Kosiah is the first Liberian to be tried for war crimes perpetrated during the conflict. Another Liberian rebel leader was found guilty of crimes against humanity and torture by a court in Paris in November 2022.
Kosiah's appeal trial opened in Bellinzona on 11 January and is expected to end on 3 February. Alain Werner, director of Civitas Maxima, is representing four of the plaintiffs who came to Switzerland to testify.
— It follows four hikes in 2022 which brought euro zone rates out of negative territory for the first time since 2014.
— If China is excluded from the calculation, remittances are the largest source of external finance in low and middle–income countries, exceeding the value of foreign direct investment and official development aid, the World Bank says.
— It vanished while being transported by truck from Rio Tinto's Gudai-Darri mine in the remote Pilbara region of W.A. to a storage facility about 870 miles away in the state capital Perth. Authorities said they found the capsule on the side of the road and it's believed to have fallen from the truck.