- The former Liberian president was convicted of war crimes
- Prosecutors say he deserves an 80-year sentence for the conviction
- Taylor aided fighters in a civil war in neighboring Sierra Leone
- He has the chance to speak at a sentencing hearing Wednesday
(CNN) -- Charles Taylor is expected Wednesday to address the international court in the Netherlands that found him guilty last month of aiding and abetting war crimes in Sierra Leone.
Prosecutors have said the former Liberian president deserves an 80-year prison sentence to reflect the gravity of the crimes.
He will have a chance to speak at a sentencing hearing on Wednesday at the court in The Hague. The judges are due to deliver their sentencing judgment on May 30.
"Should the trial chamber decide to impose a global sentence, 80 years' imprisonment would be appropriate," Brenda Hollis, chief prosecutor for the Special Court for Sierra Leone, said in a statement earlier this month.
"But for Charles Taylor's criminal conduct, thousands of people would not have had limbs amputated, would not have been raped, would not have been killed," Hollis said. "The recommended sentence provides fair and adequate response to the outrage these crimes caused in victims, their families and relatives."
The sentencing hearing Wednesday was taking place on the same day that another trial of international import in The Hague was just getting under way -- that of Ratko Mladic, who is accused of orchestrating a horrific campaign of ethnic cleansing during the bloody civil war that ripped apart Yugoslavia.
Last month's landmark ruling by the international tribunal against Taylor was the first war crimes conviction of a former head of state by an international court since the Nuremberg trials of Nazi leaders after World War II.
Taylor, 64, was found guilty of all 11 counts of aiding and abetting rebel forces in Sierra Leone in a campaign of terror that involved murder, rape, sexual slavery, conscripting children younger than 15 and mining diamonds to pay for guns.
Prosecutors accused Taylor of financing and giving orders to rebels in Sierra Leone's civil war that ultimately left 50,000 dead or missing. His support for the rebels fueled the bloody war, prosecutors said.
The prosecutors failed, though, to prove that he had direct command over the rebels who committed the atrocities.
There is no death penalty in international criminal law, and Taylor would serve out any sentence in a British prison.
He has been a pivotal figure in Liberian politics for decades, and was forced out of office under international pressure in 2003. He fled to Nigeria, where border guards arrested him three years later as he was attempting to cross into Chad.
His trial was at the Special Court for Sierra Leone in The Hague, Netherlands. U.N. officials and the Sierra Leone government jointly set up the tribunal to try those who played the biggest role in the atrocities.
The court was moved from Sierra Leone, where emotions about the civil war still run high.
Taylor becomes the first former head of state since Adm. Karl Doenitz, who became president of Germany briefly after Adolf Hitler's suicide, to be convicted of war crimes or crimes against humanity by an international tribunal.
Former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic was tried by an international tribunal, but died before a judgment was issued.
