Prosecuting Saddam: The Coalition Provisional Authority and the Evolution of the Iraqi Special Tribunal

摘要

The International Criminal Court has no temporal jurisdiction over the crimes that occurred under Saddam's rule. Tensions in the Security Council meant that there could be no realistic hope of rallying the necessary support to create an ad hoc tribunal for Iraq. Equally, the strained nature of relations between the U.N. Secretariat and the Bush administration meant that a Special Court in the Sierra Leone model was also likely unattainable. Yet with human rights groups estimating that 250,000-290,000 people had lost their lives, the crimes of Saddam Hussein's regime cried out for justice. The creation of the IST was the only judicial option open to the CPA and it honors the principle enshrined in Article 17 of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court that cases should, where possible, be resolved at a local level unless the state in question "is unwilling or unable genuinely" to take this on. Political reservations about this process are both inevitable and understandable. It will fall to the IST to answer these reservations by demonstrating its fitness for the task at hand. But neutral parties and those interested in seeing atrocity crimes addressed should at least wish the tribunal well as it struggles to meet high expectations. This is an Iraqi court seeking to address the needs of Iraqi victims and to apply international legal standards. Taken in isolation, whatever your political point of view, it is difficult to see how this could be regarded as a bad thing. Even though this may not be the best case scenario for some, surely it is better than the alternative: deadlock, inaction, and impunity. Every international tribunal established to date has struggled with limitations of one sort or another and yet rightly we persevere. The great lesson of international criminal justice has been that we should not allow the best to become the enemy of the good.