Putting the cart before the horse
The situation regarding the unwillingness of Europe and the UN to assist in the war crimes tribunals in Iraq, as well as declining technical assistance in the investigation of mass graves reads like farce. And people honestly wonder where UN-scepticism gets its feet.
To address these problems, the tribunal desperately needed help from outside legal experts. International law scholars and government lawyers have provided what guidance they could, but the best possible advisers would have been veterans of international tribunals, such as those for Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia. Their involvement would have improved both the chances that the trials would be fair and the odds that the eventual verdicts would be perceived as fair by the rest of the world. But far from facilitating such guidance, Kofi Annan has declined to assist the tribunal and blocked members of the Yugoslavia panel from participating in a training session for Iraqi judges and prosecutors–largely because of Iraqis’ insistence on empowering the tribunal to impose the death penalty.
To hear some tell it, blame for this situation lies not with Kofi Annan or the United Nations, but with the Iraqis themselves. The New York Times editorialized last week that Iraqis have “failed to agree to the minimum international legal standards, including the exclusion of the death penalty, that would have let the United Nations provide the professional legal assistance that the interim government [of] Iraq badly needs.” Similarly, Human Rights Watch has said that use of the death penalty “precludes the United Nations from providing the tribunal much-needed technical assistance.”
The Times and Human Rights Watch are right that the death penalty spat is partially to blame for the shoddy state of the tribunal. The problem is, they’re wrong about who is to blame for the death penalty spat. It’s true that Iraqis could have–and probably should have–given in on capital punishment. But at the same time, the United Nations should have recognized that no matter how strongly one feels about the death penalty, there are more important issues. And conducting fair, legitimate trials in Iraq is one of them.
Eliminating the death penalty does not result in the rule of law, the rule of law results in the elimination of the death penalty. Got it? Also the use of the death penalty is not exactly universally condemed, even by the European pols. As TNR notes the international community employed the death penalty in the Nuremburg tribunals. Maybe if the trial against Milosovic had been handled with a bit more reasonableness he’d be 6 feet under instead of 6 points ahead of the opposition in the Serbian polls.
I’m not even going to touch how sick it is that the UN has refused to lift a finger for so many genocides by way of refusing to interfere with the soveriegnty of a nation, but can refuse on principle to help bring such genociders to justice if there is the threat of one not getting to wind the last few dacades of his life down gardening and writing poetry.
OK I guess I did just touch it. Excuse me while I go wash my hands.