Charles Taylor's conviction for war crimes is a lesson to all tyrants According to the verdict passed yesterday by the Special Court for Sierra Leone, Charles Taylor, the former president of neighbouring Liberia, was responsible for helping to "design" the strategy of vicious repression that was implemented against innocent civilians in Sierra Leone. Like Adolf Eichmann and the Holocaust, Taylor did not soil his own hands with the disagreeable business of committing atrocities: he left to that to the henchmen of Sierra Leone's Revolutionary United Front, the main rebel body. The only dirty business Taylor himself undertook was to receive hundreds of millions of pounds worth of "blood diamonds" as payment for the arms he helped to ship across the Liberian border to the Sierra Leonean rebels. One of the more intriguing aspects of the trial - one that has lasted for nearly five years - was the appearance of the British supermodel Naomi Campbell, whose evidence was critical in proving the prosecution's case. Miss Campbell, who is not unaccustomed to receiving gifts from her many admirers, was surprised to be given three "small, dirty-looking stones" as a present by a member of Taylor's staff while visiting Nelson Mandela in South Africa in 1997. Miss Campbell, who memorably told the court, "I'm used to seeing diamonds shiny and in a box," gave them to a fund-raiser, not realising their potential value. Prosecutors were eventually able to use the gift as proof that Taylor traded illegally mined diamonds to arm the rebels in a war that ultimately caused the deaths of an estimated 120,000 people, and earned Taylor £950 million in blood diamonds. Given his status as Liberia's former president, Taylor probably believed he was immune from prosecution for his involvement in this grisly trade. But a significant change in the international approach to war crimes - made after the Rwandan genocide in 1994 - together with Taylor's misfortune of falling out with his protectors in Nigeria, meant that he was eventually made to face justice. He now contemplates the prospect of spending the rest of his life locked up in a high-security British prison cell. And hopefully Taylor's conviction will set a precedent for the world's other leading tyrants, who deserve to be brought to justice. He is the first head of state convicted by an international court since the post-Second World War Nuremberg tribunals. For too long the UN's convention that nations do not meddle in each other's internal affairs has meant that tyrants are left to terrorise their long-suffering people at will. During the 1990s, for example, the West was impotent to act as Saddam Hussein launched savage attacks against large sections of Iraq's Shia and Kurdish communities. For much of the past decade, Robert Mugabe has committed similar atrocities against opponents of his dictatorial regime in Zimbabwe, but attempts to hold him to account have foundered because many countries feel awkward about interfering. More recently, the Syrian president Bashar al-Assad has been caught red-handed, thanks to the release of a cache of his private emails, orchestrating the brutal repression of anti-government protesters, which has so far resulted in the deaths of more than 7,000 Syrian civilians. No doubt the likes of Assad and Mugabe still believe, as Taylor once did, that they will always be immune from prosecution because of their elevated status. But times change, as Taylor found to his cost. After yesterday's conviction, it is not beyond the bounds of possibility that they, too, may one day be forced to pay for their crimes.