PARIS, 14 May 2004 — Veteran French lawyer Jacques Verges, who has been asked to defend Saddam Hussein, said yesterday he would file a lawsuit with the International Court of Justice accusing Britain of war crimes in Iraq.
Verges said he had drawn up the suit on behalf of “the families of prisoners of the coalition in which Britain participates.”
“The reality of torture and systematic abuses of the dignity of Iraqi prisoners, sometimes followed by murders, both by US and British troops is no longer in question,” the text of the complaint reads.
“There are strong presumptions that the facts that form the basis of our complaint were committed with the participation of nationals of the United Kingdom, which unlike the US... is a party to the (court’s) statute,” the text goes on.
The United States does not recognize the jurisdiction of the ICC, which began work in July 2002 with the aim of “ensuring that the gravest international crimes do not go unpunished.” In London meanwhile, the British government yesterday branded photographs allegedly showing its troops abusing an Iraqi detainee as fakes, saying they were not taken in Iraq.
“These pictures were categorically not taken in Iraq,” Armed Forces Minister Adam Ingram told Parliament of the images published by the Daily Mirror newspaper.
“The truck in which the photographs were taken was never in Iraq,” he added.
