Encouraging news from The Hague, where the war crimes trial of former Liberian president Charles Taylor looks finally to have secured a much-needed celebrity angle. Naomi Campbell will now be summoned to give evidence in Taylor's trial, after the Special Court for Sierra Leone granted a request by prosecutors to call the supermodel.
You might recall that last year, Mia Farrow provided a written testimony to the court suggesting that Taylor had given Naomi a huge uncut blood diamond after a South African reception in 1997. Naomi, alas, refused to elaborate. Her only public statement on the matter came in a recent TV interview with Oprah Winfrey, when she declared dismissively, "I don't want to be involved in this man's case," as though it were a matter of choice on a par with declining a Roberto Cavalli ad campaign or the chance to spend a weekend in St Tropez.
For their part, Hague prosecutors spoke of their "many unsuccessful attempts" to contact her. And one can only picture Naomi's crystal-encrusted BlackBerry ringing out in the back of whichever maid's skull into which it had just been embedded, following the failure to locate a specific pair of jeans or suchlike.
Happily, this communication glitch should be ironed out by the fact of the formal summons issued on Wednesday, in which the court's four-judge panel ruled Naomi's evidence "highly probative and material to the indictment".
That Naomi will find a war crimes trial slightly harder to get out of than a fashion shoot seems guaranteed. Less certain, however, is Radovan Karadzic's ability to hang on to his record for arsiest behaviour in a Hague courtroom, with madam's fabled timekeeping skills likely to challenge even the former Bosnian Serb leader's reputation for arrogant no-shows.
