BUT, BUT...DID THEY READ HIM HIS MIRANDA RIGHTS.

Saddam must get real justice (Geoffrey Robertson, The Spectator, December 2nd, 2005)

The moral claim of the Iraqi people to exact retribution sounds fine in theory — as President Bush argues, ‘They were the people who were brutalised by this man.’ But if justice can neither be done nor be seen to be done in Baghdad, in the midst of a civil war in which the defendant’s ‘people’ are killing the ‘people’ of the judges, then Iraq’s claim must give way to the moral and legal right of the international community to try international crimes. The genocide charges which Saddam faces for the gassing of the Kurds and for mass-murdering the Marsh Arabs are crimes ‘against humanity’ because the very fact that they can be conceived and committed by fellow human beings demeans us all, wherever we live and whatever our nationality.

After all, Saddam and his henchmen are only in the dock because of action by a coalition led by the United States. The US established the Iraqi Special Tribunal (at a cost of $75 million), trained the judges, and arrested all the ‘playing-card’ suspects, while the evidence was amassed by the Justice Department’s Regional Crime War Liaison Office. The tribunal’s original statute, drafted by American and British lawyers, was based on UN court models and provided fair trial, with the prospect of international jurists sitting with the Iraqi judges. Last year I helped to train these courageous men who told me they wanted to sit with international colleagues, like the UN’s court in Sierra Leone.

But strange things have happened to this court since the handover. Its name has been changed, to the Iraqi Higher Criminal Court, and its statute has been rewritten to exclude the possibility of international judges (except in rare cases where a foreign state is a party). And there is a sinister new provision: ‘No authority, including the President of the Republic, may grant a pardon or mitigate the punishment issued by the court.’ Article 6(4) of the Human Rights Covenant (which the US, the UK and Iraq have ratified) insists that anyone sentenced to death must have the right to seek commutation or pardon after conviction, so this is a breach of international law at which all coalition partners seem to have connived. But merciless Iraqi politicians want Saddam executed, and this new provision will prevent President Talabani from ever considering clemency.

There is a prospect that Saddam will be executed speedily after conviction on the first charge, which accuses him, with senior officials, of killing villagers at Dujail as a reprisal after some of them made a botched attempt on his life. Many of these villagers admitted involvement in the plot and, comparatively speaking, this is the least serious of the charges which Saddam faces. His immediate execution would deprive the world of any trial, and hence any authoritative judgment, on his responsibility for genocide.

He sounds like a man who is petrified that either he will lose his job or that Saddam will be convicted. Or one who sees them as one and the same.