Saddam's trial creates a new legal model

[Dover]

Saddam's trial creates a new legal model

Tom Parker NYT Thursday, July 8, 2004
International law

NEW HAVEN, Connecticut I spent six months in Baghdad in 2003 working with Iraqis to devise a strategy for bringing Saddam Hussein and his cronies to account. Saddam's appearance before an Iraqi judge last week was the culmination of a remarkable collaboration between the American-led coalition and Iraqi jurists. It also marked an important new stage in the evolution of international justice.

For probably the first time in history, a country will put its former leaders on trial under international criminal law in a locally constituted court.

Unlike its UN sponsored cousin-courts in The Hague and Sierra Leone, the Iraqi Special Tribunal empowers local officials to bring the perpetrators of atrocity crimes to trial. International financing will go where it will do the most good - toward rebuilding Iraq's judiciary and ensuring that the victims of Saddam's regime are finally heard.

The coalition authority spent almost six months formulating tribunal plans with Iraqis. It organized working groups and conferences on subjects as diverse as truth and reconciliation commissions and forensic anthropology.

In these sessions, which were open to the public, one message came across loud and clear: Iraqis wanted to see Saddam tried by Iraqis. Coalition advisers worked closely with Iraqi lawyers to ensure that the tribunal statute we created was in harmony with the latest developments in international law....cont'd >

http://www.iht.com/articles/528352.html

[nothingshocksmeanymore]

1. It's one more thumb in the UN's nose from these people

while they skirt international law so that the details of how THEY created Saddam won't be aired.

[Matilda]

2. Sounds like a kangaroo court to me.

"The coalition authority spent almost six months formulating tribunal
plans with Iraqis"

Read: The coalition authority told the Iraqis what they needed to
do and how to do it to best please their American masters.

Saddam deserves to go on trial, but it should not be exclusively
the domain of his enemies. It should be an international court,
where his former allies will also be called to account if necessary.

[sidpleasant]

5. Yes

One of the charges against Saddam - that he put down uprisings by Kurds and the southern Shiites after the Gulf War - seems exceptionally dubious to me. Distasteful as he was Hussein was still the internationally recognized president of a sovereign nation facing an internal revolt, which he suppressed with military force. Conceptually it's not much different from Lincoln fighting the Confederacy in the Civil War or more recent battles against white supremacists trying to establish an Aryan state in Idaho. Our sympathies may have been with the rebellions but it's absurd to say that Hussein committed any sort of crime in putting them down.

[muriel_volestrangler]

6. It may the manner in which he put them down

that is the charge - blanket reprisals against whole villages, and so on. I don't know the details of the charges, or the rebellions - but given the numbers of deaths (hundred of thousands) that are talked about, it seems likely that it included massacres of innocent people.

[shockingelk]

3. This could soon become a trend:

"a country will put its former leaders on trial ..."

[saigon68]

4. Actually there is an OLD AMERICAN LEGAL Model for this behavior

IT'S CALLED THE OX-BOW INCIDENT

[markses]

7. Another way to say "new legal model"

Arbitrary power of the monarch.

New model. Pshaw. Law is not a fucking Dodge Neon.