Leaders brought to trial

Ellen L. Lutz, who taught international law at the Tufts University, and Caitlin Reiger, the Deputy Director of the Prosecutions Programme at the International Centre for Transitional Justice with experience on the Special Court for Sierra Leone, the Special Panels for Serious Crimes in East Timor and the Centre's Cambodia and Yugoslavia programmes, have edited an unusual book. Their objective was simple: Given political and military leaders' inclination to protect and defend each other, what prompted the creation of an effective International Criminal Court (ICC) to try mass murderers?

Although attention to human rights questions gained attention after 1976, when a peanut farmer from Georgia was elected president of the United States, the movement was not as popular as many assume. Jimmy Carter opened a Pandora's box that ushered in cataclysmic changes in much of the developing world.

After the early 1980s, it was next to impossible to tolerate atrocities with impunity, as high-level officials became accountable for their actions.

Since 1990, at least 67 former heads of state or government were prosecuted for either egregious human rights or financial crimes. Several were brought to trial in what appeared to be reasonably free and fair judicial processes and a few served prison terms after they were convicted.

Eight of the 12 chapters here examine the multiple prosecutions of Augusto Pinochet in Chile; the indictment of Alberto Fujimori in Peru; the punishment of Joseph Estrada in the Philippines; the trials of Frederick Chiluba in Zambia; the court proceedings of Pasteur Bizimungu in Rwanda; the hearings of Slobodan Milosovic in Serbia; the indictment of Charles Taylor in Sierra Leone; and the tribunals that convicted Saddam Hussain in Iraq.

Reasons for persecution

Besides their solid introduction to the subject (pages 1-24), the authors also provide useful legal backgrounds to various procedures that were necessary to prosecute heads of state in Europe and Latin America.

Needless to say that a range of reasons are explored to identify why and how the international community reached the point where senior leaders could be tried, assessing political motives and genuine intrigues that accompanied efforts to bring several men to justice.

Though each case is unique, high-profile trials either by foreign or before their own countries' courts targeted individuals who were literally untouchables, as best illustrated in the Iraqi case.

Political Pedagogy, Baghdad Style: The Dujail Trial of Saddam Hussain by Miranda Sissons and Marieke Wierda (pages 233-274) is immensely informative, highly analytical and profusely documented (with 136 footnotes). The two authors provide a blow-by-blow account of the case and its impact on a traumatised society. They do not prejudge but seem gleeful that Saddam received his just deserts.

Both note that "the former president radiated condescension, [while] the trial judge looked nervous, and the prosecutor attempted to deliver an oratorical indictment of the former Baath regime" (page 233), which sums up the spirit of what actually occurred in this political experiment.

Because the proceedings were about the Dujail massacres that saw thousands of Iraqi Shiites killed in the most atrocious ways possible under the orders of the dictator, there is some useful background on what actually occurred (pages 127-239) and the George W. Bush administration's decision to go after Saddam as quickly as possible.

A correct link is thus made between regime change and the 2003 American-led War for Iraq (pages 242-244), which focused on Baghdad's alleged weapons of mass destruction, when Washington wanted to achieve far more than a mere correction to avenge 9/11.

The better parts of the chapter deal with the trial itself, its comical workings and the critical role played by the Regime Crimes Liaison Office, which was set up by the Coalition Provisional Authority, a ribbon-boasting arm of the Pentagon under the command of former defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

Beyond changes among judges and attorneys, the authors correctly perceive key dilemmas, including how "the tribunal failed to mitigate the proceedings' inaccessibility to the majority of the Iraqi people who, in turn, failed to understand and support its work" (page 255).

Still, though the dictator was executed under sinister conditions, the authors insist that his fate illustrated that the age of impunity ended in Iraq.

Naturally, the rule of law is perhaps not yet universally applied there and while many "were disappointed" that "the Dujail story [could] not be reduced to an ill-intentioned exercise in legal rhetoric designed to dignify judicial murder", the efforts to "establish a new standard of justice were genuine" (page 262).

Dictators should note that the rule of law, democratisation, anti-corruption and human rights norms will gain in popularity, which will strengthen the ICC that, one hopes, will also limit grave abuses.

Dr Joseph A. Kéchichian is an author, most recently of Faysal: Saudi Arabia's King for All Seasons, Gainesville, Florida: University Press of Florida, 2008.