Martina Johnson sent to trial before the Court of Assises: more than 10 years (and 60 press releases on other cases) later
Until early September 2014, the very existence of Civitas Maxima, founded in 2012, was known to almost no one. None of our cases were public, we had only a tiny team, and no one was responsible for communications.
Things changed on September 18, 2014, with the arrest in Belgium of Martina Johnson, a former member of Charles Taylor’s rebel group during the first civil war (1989–1996), the National Patriotic Front of Liberia (NPFL), accused of having committed crimes against civilians, including individuals encountered by Civitas Maxima.
With my colleagues at the time, Emmanuelle Marchand and Lisa-Marie Rudi, we were on a plane to meet potential donors in London when news of the arrest broke, and we had to improvise our very first press release from a café on Oxford Street.
This arrest received extensive coverage, including an article in The Guardian that mentioned Civitas Maxima for the first time in the international press under the headline: “Martina Johnson’s Liberian war crimes trial is a milestone in quest for justice.”
This headline was misleading, however: there was no trial in sight at the time, only an investigation and suspicions of international crimes. Martina Johnson, who was ill, was very quickly released from prison, and the years went by.
Civitas Maxima was designed to operate over the very long term. Any proceedings involving international crimes can take years, and security concerns for victims may persist even long after trials have ended. For the cases we have chosen to work on, a long-term commitment is, in our view, the only responsible way to operate in this field and to engage with victims of international crimes.
From September 2014, Civitas Maxima issued no further communications on this case until the formal decision by Belgian judges in October 2025 to close the investigations, followed by the referral to the Court of Assizes in March 2026 — more than 10 years later. During that time, our organization published more than 60 press releases on other cases and 12 annual reports, increased its annual budget sixfold, and grew its staff fivefold. In addition, six of the cases on which we collaborated in one way or another led to trials across three continents, resulting in five convictions and one acquittal.
The announcement of Martina Johnson’s arrest in September 2014 was the very first public mention of the remarkable quest for justice by Liberian victims who, unable to access justice at home for the crimes they suffered during the war, took their fate into their own hands. Since then, that quest has yielded remarkable results, including the first convictions for war crimes and crimes against humanity against Liberian nationals who participated in the civil war, and the first-ever conviction in Switzerland for war crimes and crimes against humanity before the Federal Criminal Court.
These trials, held outside the country, also prompted the Liberian government, on May 2, 2024, to establish a formal mechanism aimed at creating a tribunal to prosecute war crimes in the very country where they were committed.
It is against this broader backdrop that the highly anticipated trial of Martina Johnson — the first Liberian woman ever to be tried for international crimes — is expected to take place in 2026 or 2027, in Dutch, before the Court of Assises in Ghent, Belgium
