(DOWNLOAD) "Ceding the High Ground: The Iraqi High Criminal Court Statute and the Trial of Saddam Hussein." by Case Western Reserve Journal of International Law # Book PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Ceding the High Ground: The Iraqi High Criminal Court Statute and the Trial of Saddam Hussein.
- Author : Case Western Reserve Journal of International Law
- Release Date : January 01, 2007
- Genre: Law,Books,Professional & Technical,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 509 KB
Description
INTRODUCTION On July 1, 2004, Saddam Hussein and eleven of his co-defendants were brought before Ra'id Juhi, an Iraqi investigative judge, who was selected to preside over the initial hearing held in a specially designed courtroom in the U.S. military headquarters for Iraq, Camp Victory. (1) Millions of Iraqi, Arab, and international viewers watched the televised proceedings as the defendants were read indictments and instructed to submit a plea to the investigative judge. (2) The scene was reminiscent of an American television legal drama. This first appearance of Hussein following his capture by U.S. forces on December 13, 2003 established worldwide the strong and positive impression that a judicial process to reckon with the crimes and atrocities of the former regime had been launched. The Iraqi Criminal Procedure Law was conspicuously displayed on the left side of the table in front of Judge Juhi, symbolically asserting the Iraqi nature of the proceedings and their grounding in Iraqi law, in spite of the fact that the proceedings were carefully choreographed and carried out in the fashion of an arraignment before a U.S. court, a hearing wholly alien to the Iraqi legal system. While the legal infrastructure that would later undertake and support the much-anticipated and scrutinized al-Dujail (3) and al-Anfal (4) trials of Hussein and other former high-level Ba'athist leaders was still in the process of being organized, these subtle and conflicting signs during the first public glimpse of court proceedings were indicative of the tensions inherent in the ill-advised attempt to blend two distinct legal systems in a single specialized institution. The shortcomings of this blending process bedeviled the work of the Iraqi High Criminal Court (IHCC), (5) the successor of the Iraqi Special Tribunal (IST). (6)