Desmond de Silva (barrister)  Sir George Desmond Lorenz de Silva, (13 December 1939 – 2 June 2018) was a British lawyer known for having been the United Nations Chief War Crimes Prosecutor in Sierra Leone. Desmond de Silva was of Sri Lankan, English, and Scottish descent, and comes from a family of lawyers. He was the son of Fredrick de Silva MBE, formerly Ceylon's ambassador to France and Switzerland; the grandson of The Honourable George E. de Silva; and the second cousin of Lasantha Wickrematunge. A graduate of Dulwich College Preparatory School and Trinity College, Kandy, Sri Lanka, de Silva was a senior associate member of St Antony's College, Oxford. He was a Bencher of the Honourable Society of the Middle Temple. De Silva was called to the Bar in the Middle Temple in London in 1964, and appointed Queen's Counsel in 1984. He was one of the most high-profile criminal Queen's Counsel in England. He was 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 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. 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."