BAGHDAD, 14 July 2005 — The Iraqi judge in charge of questioning Saddam Hussein and his former regime henchmen said yesterday more than 80 percent of the investigation into their cases was complete amid increasing calls to speed up the trials. “The investigation is quite advanced with more than 80 percent completed (but) deciding the date of the trials is not the specialty of the investigative judges,” Raed Juhi, a senior judge on the Iraqi Special Tribunal told AFP.
The decision will be made by a five-person trial court panel, sources close to the tribunal recently said. Juhi is the judge who faced Saddam at a preliminary hearing in July 2004 and who 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 Shiite communities was going on in tandem with investigating other crimes. These crimes included the invasion of neighboring 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 were 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 reorganize the court set up by the previous US-led occupation authority before the handover of sovereignty to Iraq in June 2004.
