Sirte, Libya - Nigeria said on Monday it would not bend to pressure to hand Charles Taylor to an international court, saying that would contradict terms agreed for the former Liberia leader to leave power for exile.
A special Sierra Leone court, set up to try suspected war criminals from a civil war that killed 50 000 people in the impoverished nation of 5,4 million people, has asked the United Nations Security Council to help bring Taylor to justice.
The Security Council has blamed Taylor for fuelling war across West Africa, including in Liberia and Sierra Leone, where rebels hacked off limbs, burned civilians to death and forced drugged children into battle.
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Taylor now lives in Calabar, Nigeria. The regional power has said it will act to hand Taylor over to the court only if Liberia itself makes such a request.
"Without substantiated new allegations against Charles Taylor since he came to Nigeria, we are being pressured, harassed, blackmailed, even intimidated and even threatened to hand over Charles Taylor contrary to the terms of his voluntary departure from his country," Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo told an African Union (AU) summit in Libya.
He said Africa should not agree to do anything to destabilise the "seemingly smooth" transition process in Liberia, which would have repercussions in the rest of West Africa.
"If there is no abatement of pressures and harassment and if it is considered necessary, we will come back to formally place the matter before the AU and ECOWAS (regional Economic Community of West African States) for decisions."
The Sierra Leone court says even from exile, Taylor remains in close contact with Liberian political, business and government figures and travels freely in West Africa.
It also said it had evidence Taylor had funnelled money from the al-Qaeda network to a man who later announced his candidacy for the Liberian presidency.
Obasanjo said it had been an international decision that Nigeria grant Taylor asylum in 2003 to help stabilise West Africa and end years of conflict in Liberia.
In May, the US House of Representatives passed a nonbinding resolution urging Nigeria to turn over Taylor to the special court in Sierra Leone that indicted him in March 2003 on 17 counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity.
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