Global Policy Forum

By Jess Bravin

If Saddam Hussein wonders what awaits him if U.S. forces conquer Iraq, he might look to judicial proceedings unfolding 4,000 miles from Baghdad in the African capital of Freetown, Sierra Leone.

There, in a bullet-ridden house that rebels once used to torture prisoners, a veteran Pentagon lawyer is readying indictments of the alleged instigators of mass killings, rapes and amputations that marked the country's civil war. The charges will go before the Special Court for Sierra Leone, a new type of war-crimes tribunal formed by agreement between the United Nations and the Freetown government.

The U.S. was deeply involved in creating the Sierra Leone court and plans to provide one-third of its $54 million budget. U.S. officials say the court offers a model that could be used to try Mr. Hussein and his top aides for crimes against humanity that were allegedly committed during his 24-year dictatorship, including a genocidal campaign against the minority Kurds in 1987.

Later this month, top U.S. officials are expected to discuss how to address Baghdad's alleged crimes. Officials say that any decisions will be preliminary, hinging on whether there is an armed overthrow of Mr. Hussein, the shape of any future Baghdad regime, and the response of foreign governments. Some Bush administration officials favor sending the regime's leaders to U.S. military courts. Other options include an international criminal tribunal, trials held by a successor Iraqi government, and a nonjudicial "truth and reconciliation" commission.

But over the past year, U.S. officials have cited the ad hoc Sierra Leone court as a template for future war-crimes prosecutions overseas, instead of the decade-old U.N. tribunals for Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia and the permanent International Criminal Court supported by the European Union.

"It's the next generation of tribunals," says David Crane, a former U.S. Defense Department lawyer who was named as the Sierra Leone prosecutor in April 2002 by U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan after intense lobbying by U.S. diplomats. The special court's design reflects U.S. frustration with the Rwanda and Yugoslavia tribunals, which remain years from concluding their work even as they each get $100 million annually from the U.N. treasury. In contrast, the Sierra Leone court operates under a tight budget directly controlled by the U.S. and other donor countries, a three-year timetable and a limited mission. It will try only those with "greatest responsibility" for atrocities during the last half of the civil war -- a few dozen out of thousands of combatants.

The Sierra Leone court's rules are based on those of the U.N. Rwanda tribunal, which derive from the Nuremberg trials after World War II. Defendants will have rights similar to those in a U.S. courtroom -- presumption of innocence, free legal representation, subpoena power and the right to remain silent. However, a panel of trial judges, rather than a jury, will rule on guilt and impose sentences.

Unlike the ICC and the U.N. tribunals, which are based in The Hague, the special court sits where the crimes took place. The location offers a number of advantages: Witnesses and evidence won't have to be shipped to a courtroom abroad, and the local population will be able to attend the trials, presumably increasing the proceedings' credibility. Unlike the ICC and the U.N. tribunals, which have no judges from the affected countries, the Sierra Leone court includes three judges appointed by the Freetown government, along with five named by Secretary-General Annan.

The court has also made a point of hiring Sierra Leoneans as lawyers and support staff, hoping to create the nucleus of a legal establishment trained in international standards of justice. And after the tribunal shuts down, its planned 12-acre complex, including a courtroom, jail and offices, will be given to the Sierra Leone government.

But the Freetown location has brought its share of problems. The court must operate amid the disorder of a failed state where stability rests on 16,000 U.N. peacekeeping troops. And Sierra Leone ranks last on the U.N. human-development index, which measures such categories as health care, literacy and economic opportunity in 172 countries. In addition to poor telephone connections, unreliable electricity and a numbing lack of recreation for the court's foreign staff, the city also remains tense and dangerous. Some fear that violence could break out when indictments are handed up later this year, and court staff say they hear that al Qaeda operatives may be roaming Freetown, where weak law-enforcement makes money-laundering easy.

"There is a downside, and that's the security risk," says the court's president, Geoffrey Robertson, an Australian appointed by the Sierra Leone government. "I don't want to end up presiding over a court that's held on a British battleship off Freetown." (In his private legal practice, Mr. Robertson has represented Dow Jones & Co., publisher of The Wall Street Journal and the online Journal.)

Nevertheless, Mr. Robertson says the Sierra Leone model would work well in Iraq and that he has discussed the matter with U.S. diplomats. "In a postwar Baghdad or a Baghdad that had regime change from the inside, it would be an important first step to allow Iraq to develop a system of justice," he says.

Not all are convinced. "Sierra Leone is not Iraq," says David Scheffer, the Clinton administration's ambassador at large for war-crimes issues. "There's a real benefit to getting the top leadership out of Iraq and not have them percolating in Iraqi detention centers staffed by Americans," says Mr. Scheffer, who helped design the Sierra Leone court and has compiled dossiers on alleged war crimes by the Baghdad regime. "It could be so disruptive of building Iraqi democracy to have this hard-line element still kicking around in Iraq and generating dissension."

On the other hand, any kind of international court "is going to be very difficult to sell to the Iraqis" who suffered under Mr. Hussein because such tribunals won't impose death sentences, says Charles Forrest, chief executive of Indict, a U.S. government-funded group in London that advocates war-crimes prosecutions for Iraq.

Mr. Forrest has been working with Iraqi exile lawyers assembled by the State Department to help plan a post-Saddam justice system. Rather than involve the U.S. or the U.N., "they believe that Iraq should conduct these trials itself. It's a nationalistic, patriotic attitude that extends to all factions of Iraqis," he says. While Americans may be skeptical of the country's legal foundation, he says, "they say that Iraq is the birthplace of law, starting with the Code of Hammurabi."

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