Storm
Rages Over Trial, Sentence
By Olivia Ward
30 December, 2006
The Toronto
Star
A trail of blood led across the
Middle East to the door of Saddam Hussein's cell.
But while the man labelled the Butcher of Baghdad had few defenders,
a number of prominent human rights advocates have criticized his death
sentence, and the trial that preceded it, as a travesty of justice.
During the year-long proceedings
three defence lawyers were murdered, a judge resigned and two others
were fired, lawyers boycotted the courtroom and Saddam told the tribunal
to "go to hell."
"There were a number
of concerns as to the fairness of the original trial, and there needs
to be assurance that these issues have been comprehensively addressed,"
said Louise Arbour, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights,
before Saddam's hanging was carried out. "I therefore call on the
Iraqi authorities not to act precipitately in seeking to execute the
sentence in these cases."
Arbour, a former prosecutor
at the International Criminal Tribunal for Former Yugoslavia, indicted
Serbian strongman Slobodan Milosevic, who later died before the court
could arrive at a verdict.
Saddam was executed this
morning following the rejection of an appeal earlier this week. The
Iraqi government had a 30-day deadline to carry out the death sentence,
but pressed for the earliest time.
The much-feared dictator
was convicted for his role in the killing of 148 Shiite men and boys
after an assassination attempt against him in the central Iraqi town
of Dujail in 1982.
He would not go on trial
for a second case charging him with responsibility in the deaths of
thousands of Kurds during an anti-Kurdish campaign in the late 1980s.
Hundreds of thousands of other Iraqis were killed during Saddam's regime,
including Shiites who rebelled after the 1991 Gulf War.
From the time U.S. forces
dragged Saddam, bewildered and unkempt, from an underground hideout
in December 2003, fierce debate raged about how to bring him to justice.
With Iraq emerging from war
and political tumult, and its legal system for decades a captive of
a corrupt and authoritarian regime, many judicial experts believed Saddam
should be tried in an international court, or by a "mixed court"
including international experts and Iraqis.
But, says Richard Dicker
of Human Rights Watch, one of the leading critics of the trial, "even
before the U.S. troops took Baghdad the American government announced
it wanted an all-Iraqi tribunal. The decision was made regardless of
the facts on the ground."
Dicker said that holding
the trial in Iraq was "not wrong," in spite of spiralling
violence that later created a security nightmare. But without any international
lawyers and jurists taking part, "the trial went off the rails
at the moment of conception."
U.S. President George W.
Bush's administration, Dicker said, "was at a low point in its
jihad against the International Criminal Court," when insisting
on an all-Iraqi trial, "and it also wanted to make sure (the verdict)
would include the death penalty, which wouldn't happen in an international
court."
But with America the biggest
financial and technical supporter of the trial – contributing
more than $100 million (U.S.) to courtroom construction, and supplying
the Iraqis with advisers, lawyers and forensic investigators –
the trial was also open to charges of bias from the start.
In addition it suffered from
meddling by Iraqi politicians, who publicly criticized the proceedings.
Human Rights watch said the tribunal "was undermined from the outset
by Iraqi government actions that threatened the independence ... of
the court." It also pointed to failures to disclose key evidence,
violations of the defendant's right to confront witnesses, and lapses
of judicial demeanour.
The trial was conducted in
an atmosphere of intensifying violence, with Saddam's Sunni Muslim supporters
threatening retaliation, and revenge attacks on Shiites and Sunnis escalating.
But Michael Scharf, an internationally
respected American law professor who helped to train Iraqi judges and
lawyers for Saddam's trial, says that although it "will probably
go down in history as the messiest war crimes trial ever," the
court did a "reasonable job against amazing challenges."
"The people who criticized
the trial were premature," he said in a phone interview, referring
to Human Rights Watch. "They should have waited for the written
judgment. It is 298 single-spaced pages, the longest in history. The
findings were very detailed, and you're left with a history of the regime
that will withstand the forces of revisionism."
Amnesty International has
also condemned the trial, calling it "deeply flawed and unfair,
due to political interference which undermined the independence of the
court." And it adds, "the Appeals Court should have ... ordered
a fair retrial, not simply confirmed the sentences as if all was satisfactory
at the trial stage."
The Vatican, too, weighed
in, saying that Saddam's death penalty punishes "a crime with another
crime." And the Reverend Jesse Jackson pointed out that Saddam
had been a U.S. ally while committing "heinous crimes against humanity...
Saddam as a war trophy only deepens the catastrophe to which we are
indelibly linked."
In a report issued earlier
this month, the U.S. Congress's Iraq Study Group said "the problems
in the Iraqi police and criminal justice system are profound,"
recommending that the U.S. Justice Department take part in a sweeping
reform.
But Scharf, author of the
newly published Saddam on Trial, said that the training of the Iraqi
judges and lawyers for the trial anticipated some of the "crazy
things" that happened as it got underway. "We had standby
lawyers in case they walked out – and ultimately they boycotted
about 90 per cent of the trial. The challenge of trying to maintain
order and give Saddam his day in court were so overwhelming that it
was one the tribunal just couldn't live up to."
But he said, "he got
39 days to make speeches and say the most outlandish things.
"It was the rule of
law, and hopefully, one of the lessons of the trial."
He added, "it's hard
in the middle of a moment in history to see how this will be remembered.
If Iraq ends up as a failed state like Somalia, it will not be significant.
"But if in 10 years Iraq has a democratic government, the trial
of Saddam will be one of the seminal events in the transition toward
democracy and peace."
Copyright © 2006 Toronto
Star Ltd
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