ICTJ in the News

December 17, 2003

Iraqi tribunals will need help from outside, say UC experts

San Francisco Chronicle

Nation lacks seasoned judges and prosecutors

By Charles Burress

Entering the debate that has flared this week over who should sit on the new war crimes tribunal for Iraq, two highly regarded UC Berkeley experts on such prosecutions urged Tuesday that international judges and prosecutors serve along with Iraqis.

The charter for the tribunal was approved by the U.S.-appointed Iraqi Governing Council last week, and council spokesman Hamid al-Kifai said Tuesday the panel "will be 100 percent an Iraqi tribunal," according to a BBC transcript of an interview broadcast by Al-Jazeera television. "The judges will also be Iraqis," he said.

It remained undecided Tuesday whether Saddam Hussein, who was captured Saturday, would appear before the tribunal, which is expected to try many of Hussein's subordinates.

Professor David Cohen, head of the Berkeley War Crimes Study Center, and Eric Stover, head of UC Berkeley's Human Rights Center, said Iraq lacked jurists and prosecutors with experience in war crimes prosecution.

The process should be Iraqi-led, Cohen and Stover said, but if the trials are to stand the legal scrutiny of history, they should also include the emerging corps of international war-crimes judges, prosecutors and investigators from war-crimes prosecutions in Yugoslavia, Rwanda, East Timor, Indonesia and Sierra Leone.

Cohen and Stover, who go to Sierra Leone next month to help set up a training program for that nation's newly established war crimes tribunal, are being listed as potential trainers for Iraq on a team of experts being assembled by the New York-based nonprofit International Center for Transitional Justice, which has been in consultation with some members of the Iraqi Governing Council.

President Bush said Monday that the Iraqi people should decide the fate of Saddam Hussein, though he did not indicate whether Hussein should be tried by the new tribunal.

Asked whether the tribunal could include non-Iraqis, U.S. State Department spokesman Richard Boucher told reporters Tuesday that the new charter gave the Governing Council authority to appoint non-Iraqi judges.

On whether such decisions would be left solely to the Iraqis, Boucher said, "There are many issues that we need to work through, technical and legal issues in the establishment of this tribunal, but also in the decision making about how, where and when Saddam Hussein is tried. So we'll work through all those issues, and we'll decide what the most appropriate constitution of the court to try Saddam Hussein is."

A hybrid court of Iraqis and international experts could "satisfy the desires of the Iraqi people and keep the court up to international standards," said Stover, who this summer helped survey Iraqi attitudes on what form of justice should be adopted. He also helped organize the 1991 investigations of killings and chemical attacks against Kurds in Iraq.

Cohen, who has conducted training and monitoring programs for war crimes tribunals in East Timor and Indonesia, said the tribunal should resist political pressures to reach speedy verdicts on the many cases that are expected to be brought against members of Hussein's regime.

He said "one of the lessons of Nuremberg" was the importance of taking the care and time needed to compile a "permanent and authoritative and historical record of the regime."

Hally Megally, head of the Middle East program for the International Center for Transitional Justice, said that a summer survey of Iraqi people showed majority support for a U.N. role and that the court must avoid "the perception that this is a process controlled by the winners -- more of a victor's justice -- rather than an independent and impartial process."