Quick Facts
Biography
Sir Desmond Lorenz de Silva, QC, KStJ (born 13 December 1939) is a prominent British lawyer, and former United Nations Chief War Crimes Prosecutor in Sierra Leone.
Background
Desmond de Silva is of Sri Lankan and Anglo-Scottish origins and comes from a family of lawyers. He is the son of Fredrick de Silva, MBE, formerly Ceylon's ambassador to France and Switzerland, and the grandson of The Honourable George E. de Silva.
Family
He married Princess Katarina Karađorđević of Yugoslavia on 5 December 1987. She was the daughter of Prince Tomislav of Yugoslavia and Princess Margarita of Baden, a granddaughter of 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.
Desmond has one sister, Helga de Silva, whose son, Detmar Blow was married to the late Isabella Blow.
Education
A graduate of Dulwich College Preparatory School and Trinity College, Kandy, Sri Lanka, de Silva is a senior associate member of St. Antony's College, Oxford. He is 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 is one of the most high-profile criminal Queen's Counsel in England. He is 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.
De Silva's legal expertise includes war crimes, crimes against humanity, espionage, treason, drugs, terrorism, human rights, white-collar fraud and sports law. His clients have included Harry Redknapp, John Terry, Ron Atkinson, Hans Segers, Lawrence Dallaglio, Graham Rix, Lee Bowyer and Jamie Osborne. De Silva is a member of the Governing Council of the Manorial Society. 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"; however, Finucane's family called the de Silva report a "sham."
On 23 July 2010 he was appointed 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 the 10th of January 2016 a Senior Army Commander complained about a "witch hunt" against British soldiers who were Iraq war veterans by pursuing frivolous legal claims. Sir Desmond agreed with the Army Chief by saying, "Up to now nobody has got these ambulance-chasing lawyers by the scruff of the neck."
Honours
Sir Desmond was knighted in the 2007 New Year Honours, and is 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. On 22 August 2016, Alexander, Crown Prince of Yugoslavia awarded him with the Grand Cross of the Order of the White Eagle.