Desmond de Silva

Desmond de Silva   (barrister)
Born	13 December 1939
Died	2 June 2018 (Age 78)
Nationality	UK
Alma mater	Dulwich College Preparatory School, Trinity College (Kandy), Middle Temple
Siblings	Helga de Silva Blow Perera
Spouse	Princess Katarina of Yugoslavia
British establishment lawyer. Covering up state crimes and aiding in war propaganda.  Chief Prosecutor In office 2005 - 2011 Employer Special Court for Sierra Leone

Sir George Desmond Lorenz de Silva was a British criminal law barrister. A "flamboyant" and "colourful" celebrity character who advised "senior military figures and influential individuals from the financial and political world", he was one of the first barristers to earn £1 million a year.

A part of the British establishment, he led a cover-up of the murder of Belfast lawyer Pat Finucane and in 2014 helped create propaganda for the covert war on Syria. He was also United Nations Chief War Crimes Prosecutor in Sierra Leone.

Early life

Desmond de Silva was of Sri Lankan, English, and Scottish descent, and comes from a family of lawyers.

During the Second World War, his grandfather George E. de Silva, a lawyer and one of the founding fathers of Sri Lankan independence, was a member of Lord Mountbatten’s Ceylon war council and was a regular visitor to the De Silva household, known as Uncle Dickie to Desmond. He had a privileged childhood, visiting the family’s rubber and tea estates and partaking in shooting parties, while meeting visiting movie stars, including Laurence Olivier, his wife Vivien Leigh and Gregory Peck.

Educated at Dulwich College Preparatory School in London, and Trinity College in Sri Lanka, de Silva trained as a barrister at the Middle Temple, London.

Career

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

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, 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.

Cover-up of Pat Finucane murder

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".

Both Cameron and de Silva were members of the Carlton Club, close to the Conservative Party and bombed by the IRA in 1990. This means that "one member hired another to investigate one of the most controversial killings of the Troubles, of a solicitor, many of whose clients belonged to the organisation which bombed their exclusive club."

Finucane's family called the de Silva report a sham. Geraldine Finucane, the widow of the murdered lawyer, said "What's most hurtful and insulting is that this report is not the truth. It's a report into which we have had no input. The British government has engineered a suppression of the truth behind the murder of my husband. Dead witnesses and now-defunct military organisations had been given the main share of the blame"

War propaganda on Syria

Full article: File:Carter-Ruck Syria Report.pdf

In 2014, he was Chairman of the team writing the Carter-Ruck Syria Report, a text-book example of the how and why of demonising one's enemies. This widely reported shock-horror document is 'leaked' just prior to a conference, the outcome of which is regarded as crucial to Western global policy interests.

Personal life and death

He married Princess Katarina of Yugoslavia, 21 years his junior, on 5 December 1987, but they divorced in 2010 after he announced to her that she wasn’t intelligent enough for him. 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. He had one sister, Helga de Silva, whose son Detmar Blow was married to the late Isabella Blow.

His sister is Helga de Silva Blow Perera<fef>https://www.helgasfolly.com/history</ref>, a former model who runs an eccentric hotel in Sri Lanka.

Sir Desmond de Silva died on 2 June 2018 after a stroke following elective heart surgery in November 2017.

It took more than ten weeks after his death from heart failure, aged 78, for a death certificate to be issued. A later inquest pointed to medical malpractice as contributing to his death.

 

A Document by Desmond de Silva

Title	Document type	Publication date	Subject(s)	Description
File:Carter-Ruck Syria Report.pdf	report	20 January 2014	2011 Syrian Insurgency	A text-book example of the how and why of demonising one's enemies. A widely reported shock-horror document is 'leaked' just prior to a conference, the outcome of which is regarded as crucial to Western global policy interests.

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