Saddam's trial

While trying to wake up this morning and struggling with a cold that seems to have no intentions of ever going away, I heard a report on the BBC Radio 4 Today Programme about the Saddam trial which re-visits the question of whether Saddam's trial should have been conducted outside Iraq and generally how well the trial is going.

I was pleasantly surprised by the guest, Geoffrey Nice QC, the lead prosecutor in the Milosevic case, who left a negative impression on me the one and only time I met him previously. He makes a number of interesting remarks and he is worth hearing. The key one is that it is really difficult to know really how the trial is going because it is only partially and rarely broadcast! This is something that I am currently working on together with James Gow, and it struck me recently when I searched the CNN database, that almost all clips of the trial are named something like "Chaos", "Circus", "Crisis" etc. reporting the trial only when Saddam is reprimanded/kicked out or something similar, while more often than not ignoring the evidence presented. This damages a key part of the process - namely storytelling and establishing facts on the alleged crimes.

Another point to make is the question on whether the trial should have been held somewhere else. Although the security situation in Iraq makes this and interesting proposition, it just shows that war crimes tribunals have an uphill struggle to prove their legitimcay and worthiness. The ICTY was often criticised as removed from the region and thus less able to contribute to the reconcilliation process in the former Yugoslavia. At the same time, the legitimacy of the Iraq tribunal is already contested. Having the trial somewhere else would have damaged it further.