The Iraqi judge in charge of questioning Saddam Hussein and his former regime henchmen said on Wednesday that more than 80% of the investigation into their cases is complete.
”The investigation is quite advanced with more than 80% completed [but] deciding the date of the trials is not the speciality of the investigative judges,” said Raed Juhi, a senior judge on the Iraqi special tribunal.
The decision will be made by a five-person court panel, sources close to the tribunal recently said.
Juhi is the young judge who faced Saddam at a preliminary hearing in July last year and he also appeared questioning the ousted leader in video footage released by the tribunal in June.
He said building up the cases against Saddam and his deputies for genocide against the country’s Kurdish and Shi’ite communities is going on in tandem with investigating other crimes.
These crimes include the invasion of neighbouring Kuwait in 1990 and the war against Iran in the 1980s, which left almost one million people dead on both sides.
Juhi said the defendants are likely to face several trials, with the duration of each depending on the gravity of the accusations and their complexity.
”The complexity of the case will decide the duration,” he said.
Iraq’s Parliament is working on draft legislation that would reorganise the court set up by the previous United States-led occupation authority before the handover of sovereignty to Iraq in June last year, amid strong criticism by many Iraqi officials of the slow pace in starting the trials more than 18 months since Saddam’s capture.
The new legislation deals with potential loopholes in the tribunal’s bylaws or elements that may contradict Iraqi law, according to deputies.
Mariam al-Rayes, a Shi’ite deputy sitting on Parliament’s judicial committee, had said that Parliament wanted Saddam’s trial to start in October.
A first reading of the proposed law took place on Wednesday. It was not immediately clear in what ways it differed from the tribunal’s current statute.
Deputies will discuss the Bill in more detail next week, according to Deputy Speaker Hussein Shahristani.
Juhi said the new legislation is unlikely to change the tribunal drastically or affect the pace of the investigation and trial date.
He said it could shore up the authority of the tribunal, which has jurisdiction over both Iraqi and international law.
”It is a matter of legal opinions and everyone is entitled to their opinion,” he said. — Sapa-AFP