It appears that it will be some time before captured former dictator Saddam Hussein faces trial for his actions over the past three decades.
US President George W. Bush said when asked if he had a personal message for Saddam: "Good riddance. The world is a better place without you."
But Bush also warned on Monday that "the terrorists in Iraq remain dangerous."
PHOTO: AP
Bush said the US and Iraq would organize a fair and public trial for the 66-year-old Saddam, but Iraqis would decide whether he would face possible execution.
"We will work with the Iraqis to develop a way to try him that will stand international scrutiny," Bush told a Washington news conference, leaving no room for a UN role in judging Saddam.
Saddam was captured by US troops on Saturday after a tip-off led them to a hole on a farm near his hometown of Tikrit, north of Baghdad. He is being held as a prisoner of war.
The current head of Iraq's US-appointed Governing Council, Abdelaziz al-Hakim, said during a visit to Paris on Monday that Saddam could be tried by Iraqis in a special court set up by the council last week and could face the death penalty.
Another Governing Council member who saw Saddam on Sunday said he had found "a very broken man."
"He was, I think, psychologically ruined and very demoralized," Muwaffaq al-Rubaiye said. "He felt safer with the Americans."
The 15-nation UN Security Council, sharply divided over the war, is considering a report on the UN's future role in Iraq by Secretary-General Kofi Annan, who said Saddam's capture removed a "rather long shadow" over the transition process.
Annan said he did not support the death penalty for the former Iraqi leader ousted in the US-led invasion of Iraq launched on March 20. He added any trial court had to meet international norms and standards.
Britain also said on Monday it would play no part in any trial that might lead to Saddam's execution.
A senior US State Department official who asked not to be named said Washington reserved the right to bring its own charges against Saddam. He did not say how this might be done.
He emphasized that a vast number of issues had to be resolved before a trial could take place.
These include deciding whether international or local courts should have jurisdiction, under which statutes he might be tried, how to ensure his safety if he is placed in Iraqi custody, how to protect witnesses who might testify against him and how to treat claims of nations like Iran and Israel.
Asked how long it might be before Saddam faced a judge, the official said: "It will take some time. It's not weeks away."
War crimes legal experts voiced fears that the trial would be a travesty of justice without a role for the international judicial community.
Several professional jurists, including a retired US judge from the Yugoslav war crimes tribunal in The Hague, said Monday that without international expertise the court risks compromising its credibility at home and abroad. It would also miss an opportunity to create a historic record of the suffering of the Iraqi people under the dictatorship.
The Iraqi court's statute calls for the prosecution of war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide, as defined under international humanitarian law. But the panel of judges must be Iraqi, according to the statute, and international experts would play a mere advisory role.
Critics of the court said that after three decades of isolation from developments in international law, Iraq isn't yet ready to hold fair legal proceedings in a complicated war crimes case.
In comparison, a local tribunal for war crimes in Bosnia was established only this year, eight years after the end of fighting and after the start of the trial in February last year of former Serb leader Slobodan Milosevic at the UN-backed Yugoslav tribunal in The Hague.
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