| NEW
YORK - April 8 - Iraqis responsible for past crimes should be
prosecuted before an international tribunal, not the U.S.-sponsored,
Iraqi-led judicial process outlined at the Pentagon today, Human
Rights Watch said.
A tribunal
composed of Iraqi jurists selected by the United States would
not have the capacity to adjudicate the staggering scope of crimes
by the Iraqi government, including genocide, crimes against humanity,
and war crimes.
Iraq's Revolutionary
Courts, State Security Courts, and Special Provisional Courts
have been instruments of repression rather than impartial judicial
institutions, Human Rights Watch said. The Iraqi state has also
interfered with other civil and criminal courts.
Meanwhile,
scholars, lawyers, and jurists in the Iraqi exile community should
not be expected to shoulder the burden of handling a high volume
of politically charged prosecutions, Human Rights Watch said.
"After decades
of Ba'ath Party rule, the Iraqi judiciary has been deeply compromised,"
said Richard Dicker, director of the International Justice Program
at Human Rights Watch. "The Iraqis should certainly be involved
in this process, but the country's justice system just doesn't
have the capacity to handle a series of highly complicated trials.
The local solution proposed by the U.S. government would be a
mistake."
Dicker said
the United States should support a tribunal composed of international
jurists, or a "mixed" tribunal composed of local and international
legal experts.
Human Rights
Watch estimates that in the 1988 Anfal campaign, more than 100,000
Kurds, mostly men and boys, were trucked to remote sites and executed.
Since the late 1970s, as many as 290,000 people were "disappeared"
in Iraq. Between 1977 and 1987, some 4,500-5,000 Kurdish villages
were systematically destroyed and their inhabitants forced to
live in "resettlement camps."
Iraq's ethnic
and religious composition may also complicate the establishment
of local tribunals. For example, a judicial panel composed of
victims of the Ba'ath regime, such as Kurds or Shi'ites, could
not be considered impartial.
Reforming the
current courts and training judges for an Iraqi-led tribunal would
take considerable time, Dicker said.
"The U.S. government
can't solve this problem by offering some technical assistance
to the Iraqi judicial system," said Dicker. "That system needs
to be rebuilt from the ground up."
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