With the painful discoveries of suspected mass graves this spring still in their minds, Iraq's transitional Governing Council voted on Tuesday to create its own tribunal to judge former president Saddam Hussein's aides and functionaries on charges of war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide.
The Governing Council members, including many who say they lost family members to Saddam's campaigns of expulsions, mass executions and political torture, said they wanted all trials to be public so that the world and their Arab neighbors could understand the extent of their suffering.
"It will be a noble experiment," said Adnan Pachachi, the elder statesman of the 25-member body, which was appointed by the US-led occupation authority now controlling Iraq.
"It shows we want to apply the rule of law and not let the desire for revenge take over," he said.
The vote on the tribunal was taken in secret, as all council decisions have been, but Pachachi and other members confirmed that a proposed law setting up the court was approved without any dissent.
No copy of the law was made available to the public. But its drafters said the law would create an entirely new judicial apparatus, headed by five Iraqi judges and including investigative and prosecutorial sections. Defendants would have the right to legal representation and the right to appeal, council members said.
Several human rights groups, which said they were not given the chance to see or comment on the law in advance, said an all-Iraqi tribunal would reflect the Bush administration's aversion to international courts as well as to involvement by the UN.
Most other major war crimes trials of the past decade, whether concerning Bosnia, Sierra Leone or Rwanda, have included a formal role for UN agencies and judges with experience in war crimes trials.
"It is up to us," said Mowaffak al-Rubaie, a Governing Council member.
"But we are of course restrained by international standards, especially European human rights standards," he said.
In addition to international human rights crimes -- genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity -- the Iraqi tribunal could rely on capital crimes in Iraqi law that include wasting the country's resources, misuse of judicial powers and aggression against other nations.
Getting the special court up and running could take months, if not years, Iraqi and US occupation officials said.
Some of the financing could come from Iraq, which will depend mainly on oil revenue for its future budgets. The US Congress has also approved a grant of about US$75 million for organizing the tribunal and supporting its cases.
The supplemental appropriation includes about US$15 million for training human rights groups, finding and analyzing mass graves and creating a nationwide database drawn from the hundreds of millions of documents removed after the war from files belonging to the police and intelligence agencies.
Iraqi political leaders said they also hoped to receive more help from other nations, although European countries are not expected to be forthcoming if, as expected, the Iraqis decide to apply the death penalty once they achieve independence in the summer.
"It's too early to give a bottom-line figure," said one human rights specialist working with the Coalition Provisional Authority.
"But the Iraqis have a very realistic view of what's going on," the specialist said.
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