Tuesday, Jul 19, 2005
The Iraqi Special Tribunal, tasked with prosecuting former dictator Saddam Hussein and his henchmen, is contemplating a change to its founding statute in preparation for purging the court of suspected Ba'ath party loyalists.
A group of IST officials, including the tribunal's chief investigative judge Ra'id Juhi, met politicians informally over the weekend, apparently to request changes to its mandate that would allow tribunal judges to be sacked.
With its first case soon to proceed to trial, Mr Juhi is reportedly concerned about former members of Mr Hussein's Ba'ath party who have since joined the roughly 40 judges who make up the tribunal.
On Sunday, Mr Juhi announced that Mr Hussein would be referred for trial "within a few days" and charged in connection with alleged atrocities against the residents of al-Dujayl, a Shia town brutally repressed in the early 1980s following an attack on Mr Hussein there.
According to a Kurdish politician and legal expert who met the IST on Saturday, Mr Juhi's group wants to be sure that no procedural slip will foil the prosecution of Mr Hussein, who will probably face the death penalty if convicted.
Zakia Hakki, a Justice Ministry adviser involved in setting up the tribunal, confirmed that the proposed amendments were "all about de-Ba'athification".
The IST's founding statute already bars former Ba'ath members from serving in any capacity in the court.
But Mr Juhi and other IST members are seeking changes to three articles of the statute in order to help weed out Ba'athists who slipped past a US-supervised screening process more than a year ago, Ms Hakki said.
She played down similarities to threatened anti-Ba'ath purges from government ministries and the Iraqi security forces.
"This court has a special nature," she explained.
"There mustn't be any Ba'athist in this court, whether as a judge, a prosecutor or even a simple clerk." One judge in particular - a former provincial governor - seems to have fallen under suspicion.
Ms Hakki stopped short of blaming the suspected judge, instead saying that the court's US advisers should have been more watchful.
"The final decision was for the American experts to say this guy is to be a judge."
A veteran judge in the Iraqi system, she says she declined to serve in the IST's appeal chamber on the advice of the same US experts who noted her links to the Kurdistan Democratic party, an opposition group that fought Saddam's regime.
"About half" the tribunal's judges are linked to previously underground opposition groups, said Zuhayr al-Maliky, former chief investigative judge at Baghdad's central criminal court. As an Iraqi rather than international tribunal, the IST is authorised to pass sentences for death by hanging or shooting. Some of Iraq's politicians, including prime minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari, have pushed for the speeding-up of the justice process, in spite of the IST's nominal independence from political interference.
By NEIL MACDONALD
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