A fresh look at Saddam's appeal

As we prepare for the hangings of Saddam Hussein’s half-brother Barzan Ibrahim al-Tikriti and revolutionary court judge Awad al-Bandhar, it’s worth taking a fresh look at the appeals verdict in the Dujail trial.

By everyone’s admission, the decision came quickly – too quickly in the minds of Human Rights Watch, US officials in Iraq and of course Saddam’s lawyers. The appellate chamber upheld Saddam's death sentence on December 26th three weeks after receiving the defense team's legal arguments.

However, the Iraqi prime minister’s office defended the speedy appeals process. “The Americans had wanted the Iraqi High Tribunal to take their time with the appeal. According to the US advisors working with the tribunal it was a rushed job. It was too fast, but the tribunal is independent and no one can interfere with it, neither the Americans nor the Iraqi government,” one senior Iraqi official told me.

The appeals brief by the defense had to be submitted to the tribunal’s nine-judge appellate chamber within 30 days of the verdict in the trial for the killing of 148 villagers from Dujail in the mid-1980s after an assassination attempt on Saddam’s life.

But the court did not release a written copy of its decision until two weeks into the appeals process. From there, the defense only had another 14 days to submit their arguments.

“The defense lawyers had only two weeks in which to file their appeals and the appeals chamber which had never had handled a verdict appeal before apparently analysed a 300-page verdict and the defense appeal brief in a record three-weeks time,” said Richard Dicker, head of the international justice programme at Human Rights Watch.

“Something is wrong with this picture. There were serious flaws in the trial but those pale next to what seems to be an appeals process in name only.”

Defense lawyer Najeeb al-Nauimi, a Qatari attorney, complained the tribunal did not even deliver them an actual copy of the original verdict and the defense team had to drag it from the court's website as they prepared their appeals brief. He said the failure for the cour to make a copy readily available impacted their preparation of the appeals brief. "We were running short of time," he said.