Alasdair Palmer

Saddam’s trial shouldn’t be fair

The Baghdad trial was better than an international tribunal

When Mohammed al-Ureybi, the presiding judge at the trial of Saddam Hussein, started reading out that the court sentenced Saddam to death for killing 148 inhabitants of the Shiite village of Dujail in 1982, Saddam interrupted him. Just as the learned judge got to the part about the punishment for ‘crimes against humanity’, the deposed tyrant shouted, ‘Down with the traitors! Down with the invaders! To hell with your articles and your clauses!’

It is not how a man accused of crimes against humanity is supposed to react to a guilty verdict. According to the ideals of international law, he is supposed to accept his own guilt and bend his head in shame. Saddam didn’t even recognise the legitimacy of the court. He was supported by the UN’s Working Group on Arbitrary Detention, which in September concluded that Saddam was not getting a fair trial and that his deprivation of liberty was ‘arbitrary’. The UN Working Group did not advocate his immediate release. It advocated the replacement of the Iraqi court by ‘an international tribunal’ — a step which has the enthusiastic endorsement of most of the world’s fast-growing population of international lawyers.

The trials of Saddam Hussein (one is still in progress) have certainly not been a paradigm of fairness. The prosecution does not have to prove the case against him ‘beyond reasonable doubt’, but only ‘satisfy’ the judges that he is guilty. In September the then chief judge in his trial for genocide was removed because the Iraqi government felt he was ‘biased towards Saddam Hussein’. While the offending judge did indeed tell Saddam that he ‘was not a dictator …he only looked like one’, his ‘bias’ seems to have had no effect whatever on tilting the procedures of the court in the tyrant’s favour. He would not even let Saddam’s lawyers interview witnesses independently.

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