Richard Robinson is Chairman of Surrey Conservatives and Deputy Chairman for the SE Region. He was a candidate in 2004 European Elections.
I have always felt somewhat uncomfortable about the Nuremberg war crimes trials. I don’t wish to minimise the degradation of the Nazi State or the atrocities committed in its name, but the whole enterprise seemed to me too much a case of “Victors’ Justice” or, as US Chief Justice Harlan Fiske Stone so eloquently put it, “a high-grade lynching party”.
I am not a lawyer, but the thread of international law that derives from Nuremburg, through the International Court at the Hague and the prosecution at Arusha of those responsible for mass murder in Rwanda seems to me somewhat suspect. In the absence of a general International Criminal Court, however, courts set up to try participants in specific conflicts may be the best we can do: rough justice to be sure, but justice none the less.
The case of Saddam Hussein, however, is different and should give us all pause for reflection and some shame. Unlike Milosovic, Saddam was not tried at an International Tribunal. He was tried under Iraqi jurisdiction, in a court that was the creature of the occupying forces (including Britain): a blatant case of Victors’ Justice.
To judge the extent to which this court is in the pocket of the occupying powers, consider the history of the judges appointed to preside over it. We can perhaps be exonerated from any responsibility for the murder of the first, Barawiz Mahomed Mahmoud al-Merani, but when the second, Rizgar Armin, resigned under western pressure, the Americans vetoed his deputy, Sayeed al-Hammashi, because he was a former member of the Ba’ath Party. The next, Abdullah al-Amiri, was found to be too sympathetic to Saddam and removed by the government in Baghdad. So at the sixth attempt we have found a judge, Rauf Abdel Rahman, willing and able to pronounce the death sentence on Saddam, which was always the only permissible outcome.
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