Just five days ago, the Iraqi Governing Council created a tribunal so that top members of Saddam Hussein’s regime could be put on trial for crimes against humanity. Now they have Hussein himself to put in the dock.
American and Iraqi officials will meet in coming days to discuss Hussein’s future and the procedures necessary to put him on trial, said a State Department official.
“We will deal with Saddam Hussein,” said Adnan Pachachi, a member of the 25-seat interim Governing Council. “He was an unjust ruler responsible for the deaths of thousands of people.”
The governing council, the United States and its coalition partners must decide how, where and when to put him on trial and what penalty to impose in the event of a conviction, international law experts say.
Amnesty International said Sunday that it opposed Hussein being put on trial in Iraq because the country’s penal code provides for the death penalty.
Law experts say that while Iraqis will surely play a role in any trial, it will almost certainly be done under international auspices, which might mean that the death penalty will not imposed.
“The crimes are absolutely staggering,” said Diane Orentlicher, a professor of international law at American University in Washington. “Most experts accept a number along the lines of 300,000 deaths.”
According to the monitoring group Human Rights Watch, Hussein’s Baath Party leadership “perpetrated crimes including genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, torture, ‘disappearances’ and summary and arbitrary executions” during his 34-year rule. In 1988, the group said, “more than 100,000 Kurds, mostly men and boys, were trucked to remote sites and executed.”
In addition, Hussein’s government used chemical weapons against rebellious Kurds, killing thousands in their villages, including women and children.
The first question to be answered about any war-crimes trial is where it will take place, and under whose auspices, Orentlicher said.
Orentlicher said she expected the Bush administration would oppose any Hussein trial by a United Nations tribunal because of the United States’ long-standing opposition to the International Criminal Court.
The International Criminal Court established last year is not an option. It has no jurisdiction over crimes that occurred before July 1, 2002, and Iraq was not a signatory to the convention that established the court.
Orentlicher, citing “serious concerns” about the current capacity of the Iraqi legal system, argued Sunday for a judicial hybrid modeled on the court in Sierra Leone, where local judges sit side by side with international colleagues.
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