War criminal's bid to thwart extradition hearing kicked out by high court

A fugitive war criminal’s Cape Town extradition hearing can finally begin after the high court threw out his attempt to thwart it.
Gus Kouwenhoven, 77, has been sentenced to a 19-year prison term in his native Netherlands for participating in war crimes in Liberia between 2000 and 2002, and for illegally supplying weapons to then-Liberian president Charles Taylor.
The arms dealer was arrested in Cape Town in December 2017, after the Netherlands said he was a close friend of Republic of Congo (Brazzaville) president Denis Sassou Nguesso, who was likely to provide him with a safe haven.
Kouwenhoven, who owns a multimillion-rand house in Bantry Bay, spent 11 days in custody before being granted bail.
His extradition hearing was delayed by his request that the high court declares his arrest warrant invalid and that he is entitled to damages for unlawful detention.
But in a ruling on Thursday, Judge Judith Cloete dismissed Kouwenhoven’s applications and ordered him to pay the costs of the director of public prosecutions and the ministers of justice and police.
The decision means the war criminal’s extradition hearing at the Cape Town magistrate’s court can finally get under way.
Kouwenhoven was already living in Brazzaville when the Netherlands began criminal proceedings against him in 2005. He was convicted in April 2017 of contravening Dutch sanctions by supplying weapons to Taylor.
By that time, Taylor had been sentenced to 50 years behind bars for war crimes and begun his sentence at a prison in northern England.
Sentencing Taylor at the Special Court for Sierra Leone in The Hague, presiding judge Richard Lussick said: “The accused has been found responsible for aiding and abetting as well as planning some of the most heinous and brutal crimes in recorded human history.”
Kouwenhoven unsuccessfully challenged his conviction by the court of appeal in Den Bosch, and in May lodged a petition at the European Court of Human Rights, which Cloete said was still pending.
The judge criticised Warrant Officer Willem van der Heever, who works on the extradition desk at Interpol in Pretoria, for dragging his feet in acting on the Dutch extradition request but found that the procedures the arms dealer challenged had all been legally executed.
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