Tribunal on trial!

Via friday-Lunch-Club

"... Yet under those criteria, the Lebanon tribunal comes up short. It is the only international tribunal organized for a single assassination. Its legal basis is an untested hybrid of international and Lebanese law. French scholar Jean-Baptiste Beauchard notes it is the first tribunal to prosecute "terrorism." This is "a crime which is neither a war crime, nor genocide, nor a crime against humanity, but an act of terrorism, and that is a legal problem. There is no definition in international law as to what 'terrorism' means, no consensus."

The tribunal's origins "are political, a check on Hezbollah, and this plays out badly in the popular mind in Lebanon since so many worse atrocities are ignored," says a prominent American war crimes scholar close to The Hague who spoke on condition of anonymity. Another flaw, he notes, are plans to try the accused in absentia. Defendants won't be in court. "No one in a tribunal has been tried in absentia since Nuremberg, and this is acknowledged as the major flaw in that court."

Another sore subject is the tribunal's interaction, or lack of it, with civil society in Lebanon. It has been distant and aloof. Witnesses have recanted and judges have resigned without explanation...

The tribunal seemed "snakebitten from the start," says the American jurist. Initially, a German judge, Detlev Mehlis, led a 2005 commission looking into the assassination. It reported charges based on one witness that led to the arrest of four Lebanese generals. The report now reads like a Hollywood script. The witness was a con and the generals were released after sitting in jail even after the fraud was exposed.

Following this gaffe, the UN Security Council established a tribunal at The Hague in 2007. But as Mr. Beauchard puts it, the new body seemed oblivious to the need to establish legitimacy in Lebanon. "There's been a bunker mentality with this tribunal from the start," he says. "The communication with Lebanese civil society is almost nonexistent. So many opportunities were wasted."

Mark Ellis, director of the International Bar Association in London, says that while bedrock principles of international justice need support, "this [Lebanon tribunal] mechanism and the way it was used, that is not black and white. If it is hundreds of thousands killed, that's not a nuanced conversation. But this tribunal came from a very unorthodox process. It doesn't mirror any other tribunal out there. It came from a doubt that any accountability in Lebanon itself was possible. So it was an experiment; I hope it succeeds. But you commit an international justice concept to crimes of lesser degree, and that is a risk."

In Lebanon, support for or against the tribunal falls along political and sectarian lines, but there have been significant defections..."

Posted by G, Z, or B at 7:10 PM

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