Silencing Sexual Violence: Recent Developments in the CDF Case at the Special Court for Sierra Leone

This paper traverses the history of the exclusion of sexual violence evidence in the trial against three members of the Civilian Defence Force, from its initial omissions in the indictments against the accused to its most recent relegation to the realm of forbidden evidentiary territory. It looks at how an initial oversight by the prosecution became the premise upon which the majority of the bench in Trial Chamber I adopted a language of exclusion: all testimony “tainted” by sexual violence was effectively silenced. As a result, nine witnesses in the CDF trial were unable to tell their full stories. This paper argues that they should have been permitted to speak.