Defence Lawyer Says Saddam Can Never be Tried
One of the lawyers defending Saddam Hussein has said there is no way the former Iraqi dictator can ever be tried because he has sovereign immunity as head of state, and should be released as soon as possible to a safe third country, possibly Sweden. Anglo-Italian legal representative Giovanni Di Stefano says Saddam’s treatment is in flagrant breach of the Iraqi Special Tribunal’s own statute. “It is 523 days that His Excellency President Saddam Hussein is in custody, and to all intents and purposes it is unlawful” he told Rome’s Foreign Press Club on Tuesday. ”The president and members of the Revolutionary Council all have sovereign immunity,” Di Stefano argued, “even if they are mass murderers”. Di Stefano, who said he was also in close contact with Saddam’s family, said he had made a submission to the then Iraqi government last September on these grounds. He said it was a matter of ‘their own law’, referring to the statute “which cost 80 million dollars of tax payers money to write.” The difference between the Iraqi leader and former Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic was that sovereign immunity had been wiped off the post-Tito Serbian constitution, and Milosevic, unlike Saddam, is being tried by an international tribunal.
posted by Unknown @ 4:24 AM
1 Comments:
As an Italian, Mr. Di Stefano should be aware of the fate of another dictator - this one Italian. The same end should await Saddam.
http://history1900s.about.com/gi/dynamic/offsite.htm?site=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.celebritymorgue.com%2Fbenito-mussolini%2F
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