Desmond Lorenz de Silva

Sir Desmond Lorenz de Silva, QC, KStJ (born 13 December 1939) is a prominent British lawyer, and former United Nations Chief War Crimes Prosecutor in Sierra Leone.

Desmond de Silva is of Sri Lankan and Anglo-Scottish origins and comes from a family of lawyers. He is the son of Fredrick de Silva, MBE, formerly Ceylon's ambassador to France and Switzerland, and the grandson of The Honourable George E. de Silva.

He married HRH Princess Katarina Karadjordjevic of Yugoslavia on 5 December 1987. She was the daughter of HRH Prince Tomislav of Yugoslavia and HRH Princess Margarita of Baden, a grand daughter of King Alexander of Yugoslavia and the 3x great granddaughter of Queen Victoria. They divorced on 6 May 2010. They have one daughter, Victoria Marie Esmé Margarita.

Desmond has one sister, Helga de Silva, whose son, Detmar Blow was married to the late Isabella Blow.

A graduate of Dulwich College Preparatory School and Trinity College, Kandy, Sri Lanka, de Silva is a senior associate member of St. Antony's College, Oxford. He is 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 is one of the most high-profile criminal Queen's Counsel in England. He is 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.

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