Desmond de Silva (barrister)

Sir George Desmond Lorenz de Silva, QC, KStJ (13 December 1939 – 2 June 2018) was a British lawyer known for having been the United Nations Chief War Crimes Prosecutor in Sierra Leone.

This article is about the British lawyer and QC. For the Sri Lankan entertainer, see Desmond de Silva.

Background

Desmond de Silva was of Sri Lankan, English, and Scottish descent, and comes from a family of lawyers. He was the son of Fredrick de Silva MBE, formerly Ceylon's ambassador to France and Switzerland; the grandson of The Honourable George E. de Silva; and the second cousin of Lasantha Wickrematunge.

Education

A graduate of Dulwich College Preparatory School and Trinity College, Kandy, Sri Lanka, de Silva was a senior associate member of St Antony's College, Oxford. He was a Bencher of the Honourable Society of the Middle Temple.

Career

De Silva was called to the Bar in the Middle Temple in London in 1964, and appointed Queen's Counsel in 1984. He was one of the most high-profile criminal Queen's Counsel in England. He was a member of the Criminal Bar Association and the International Association of Prosecutors. In 2002, the UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan appointed him Deputy Prosecutor for the Special Court for Sierra Leone, at the level of an Assistant Secretary-General. Annan later promoted him to the post of Chief Prosecutor at the higher level of Under Secretary-General in 2005. He brought about the arrest of Charles Taylor, former President of Liberia, who was convicted of war crimes at the Hague in 2011.

In 2003, de Silva was sent as envoy by the United Nations Development Programme to Belgrade to persuade Prime Minister Vojislav Kostunica and his government to surrender indicted war criminals.[1][2]

De Silva's legal expertise included war crimes, crimes against humanity, espionage, treason, drugs, terrorism, human rights, white-collar fraud and sports law. His clients included John Terry, Lee Bowyer, Buzz Aldrin,[3] Harry Redknapp, Ron Atkinson, Hans Segers, Lawrence Dallaglio, Graham Rix and Jamie Osborne. De Silva was a member of the Governing Council of the Manorial Society.[4] In October 2011, with the approval of Prime Minister David Cameron, de Silva was appointed to head a Review into collusion by the security services and other agencies of the state into the 1989 murder of the high-profile Belfast lawyer Pat Finucane. The report was published on 12 December 2012, and acknowledged "a willful and abject failure by successive Governments";[5][6] however, Finucane's family called the de Silva report a "sham."[7] In 2019 the Supreme Court ruled that the official investigation into the Finucane murder was ineffective and failed to meet the required human rights standards. [8]

On 23 July 2010 he was appointed[9] by the United Nations Human Rights Council to investigate Israel's interception of a Gaza-bound flotilla in international waters that led to 9 deaths.

In 2014 he was Chairman of an Inquiry into torture and executions of detainees in Syria. The Report produced went before the Geneva 11 Peace Talks into the civil war in Syria.

On 10 January 2016 a Senior Army Commander complained about a "witch hunt" against British soldiers who were Iraq War veterans by pursuing frivolous legal claims. De Silva agreed with the Army Chief by saying, "Up to now nobody has got these ambulance-chasing lawyers by the scruff of the neck."[10]

Personal life and death

He married Princess Katarina of Yugoslavia on 5 December 1987. She was the daughter of Prince Tomislav of Yugoslavia and Princess Margarita of Baden, a granddaughter of King Alexander I of Yugoslavia and the great-great-great-granddaughter of Queen Victoria. They divorced on 6 May 2010. They have one daughter, Victoria Marie Esmé Margarita de Silva, who is herself in the line of succession to the British throne.[11] He had one sister, Helga de Silva, whose son Detmar Blow was married to the late Isabella Blow.

De Silva died on 2 June 2018 after a stroke following elective heart surgery in November 2017.[3]

Honours

Sir Desmond was knighted in the 2007 New Year Honours, and was also a Knight of the Most Venerable Order of Saint John and a Knight Commander of the Royal Order of Francis I. He was sworn in as a Member of the Privy Council of the United Kingdom in October 2011.[12] On 22 August 2016, Alexander, Crown Prince of Yugoslavia awarded him with the Grand Cross of the Order of the White Eagle.[13]

References
  3. Hardy, Jack (12 December 2018). "Top QC left under freezing air vent in hospital before his death after operation, inquest hears". The Telegraph.
  4. Governing Council of the Manorial Society
  5. De Silva, Rt. Hon. Sir Desmond (12 December 2012). "Pat Finucane Review: Executive Summary And Principal Conclusions". Archived from the original on 14 December 2012. Retrieved 12 December 2012.
  6. Bowcott, Owen (12 December 2012). "Pat Finucane report: army handlers 'helped loyalist gunmen select targets'". The Guardian. Retrieved 12 December 2012.
  7. Bowcott, Owen (12 December 2012). "Finucane family denounce report as a 'sham'". The Guardian. Retrieved 12 December 2012.
  8. correspondent, Owen Bowcott Legal affairs (27 February 2019). "Pat Finucane murder inquiry fell below human rights standards, judges rule". The Guardian. ISSN 0261-3077. Retrieved 22 October 2019.
  9. "UN rights body names team to probe Gaza flotilla raid ", Haaretz, 23 July 2010
  10. "PressReader.com - Your favorite newspapers and magazines". www.pressreader.com. Retrieved 22 October 2019.
  11. Blood Royal - From the time of Alexander the Great to Queen Elizabeth II, by Charles Mosley, published for Ruvigny Ltd., London, 2002 (p. 288); ISBN 0-9524229-9-9
  12. "Orders approved at the Privy Council held by the Queen at Buckingham Palace on 16th November 2011" (PDF).
  13. "Crown Prince awards Royal Orders to husbands of Karadjordjevic Princesses". The Royal Family of Serbia. 22 August 2016.
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