Lawyers doubt trial was fair
12/29/2006
By Neil MacDonald
Financial Times
Published: December 29 2006 21:32 | Last updated: December 29 2006 21:32
Saddam Hussein’s death sentence has left international law advocates feeling ill at ease.
Iraq’s former president, ousted in the US-led invasion in 2003, was convicted of crimes against humanity by a national court on home soil amid continuing violence, political turmoil and local institutional weakness.
International lawyers say domestic tribunals are theoretically preferable for trying crimes against humanity, unless weak national judicial systems or continuing instability makes a fair trial impossible. Few thought the Iraqi insurgency would still be raging at the time of Mr Hussein’s trial.
Human Rights Watch – which accused Mr Hussein’s regime of atrocities before the US government did – says he ultimately received an unfair trial with a “questionable” verdict. Iraqi politicians openly pressured the tribunal, while judges showed contempt for the defence, the group said.
While rights groups would have opposed the death penalty in any circumstances, the trial itself suffered from “procedural flaws” and “evidentiary gaps”, according to the International Center for Transitional Justice, another New York-based non-governmental organisation.
The trial of Mr Hussein and his co-defendants in the Dujayl case was “hard to disentangle from the political situation surrounding it”, says Anthony Dvorkin, editor at Crimes of War, an international law website.
The Iraqi tribunal was created under US occupation and then re-established under a sovereign Iraqi government. Even then, the ousted dictator and other defendants stayed under US military guard, and US advisers helped the prosecution gather evidence and question defendants. President George W. Bush called the death sentence “a major achievement for Iraq’s young democracy” and a victory for the rule of law over tyranny.
Mr Hussein was convicted and sentenced to death on a comparatively minor indictment – for his regime’s killing of 148 Shia civilians from Dujail, a town north of Baghdad, following the roadside ambush of his motorcade by local rebels during Iraq’s eight-year war with Iran.
The prosecution said it had chosen this smaller-scale case in order to secure one prompt conviction, while other, more complicated investigations were under way. He was also still on trial for genocide against Kurds in the so-called “Anfal campaign” when the tribunal’s nine-judge appeal chamber upheld his death sentence for Dujail on December 26.
The death sentence will probably avert the risk of Mr Hussein’s dying without a verdict – the embarrassment suffered by the United Nations tribunal for the former Yugoslavia when Slobodan Milosevic, former Yugoslav president, died in court custody earlier this year more than four years into his trial for genocide.