Tripoli vs. the ICC: Who Should Bring Gadhafi’s Son to Justice? - Der Spiegel
Now that the fighting has ceased in Libya, the lawyers have taken center stage. The International Criminal Court in The Hague and Tripoli’s new leaders can’t agree on who should put Moammar Gadhafi’s son Saif al-Islam on trial — or even whether the manhunt for the deposed dictator itself can be called off.
Is Moammar Gadhafi really dead? Although his body has apparently been buried, he will continue to live on in international legal terms for some time yet. Ever since rebel forces succeeded in toppling the Gadhafi regime, the question of how international law should deal with the case of the former dictator and his clan has become extremely complicated. The National Transitional Council, which is governing Libya in preparation for a changeover to democratic rule, wants Libyan judges to try people accused of crimes committed under the ousted regime. However, judges at the International Criminal Court in The Hague, to which the United Nations handed over Gadhafi’s case in the spring, would rather settle the matter themselves.
At present, prosecutors in The Hague are reluctant even to lift the arrest warrant they issued against Gadhafi, citing a lack of concrete evidence that he is indeed dead.
The Gadhafi case is the largest yet taken on by the ICC since it began operating in 2002. Last week, the court’s chief prosecutor, Luis Moreno Ocampo, traveled to New York to notify the UN Security Council that the ICC was “galvanizing efforts” and collecting evidence “on the territory where the alleged crimes took place” in Libya. The goal is to punish the misdeeds carried out by the murderous regime in Tripoli in a desperate attempt to cling to power. Ocampo believes he is close to securing a momentous deal: He is apparently conducting secret negotiations with emissaries of Gadhafi’s second son, Saif al-Islam, who went into hiding in late October and is now believed to be in Niger. Ocampo has issued an international arrest warrant against Saif al-Islam for involvement in human rights violations, and the accused himself is allegedly willing to hand himself over to the ICC to stand trial, which would see him moving into the relatively comfortable surroundings of the Scheveningen detention center in the Netherlands.
However, all the court’s efforts could now be brought to an abrupt halt, and frustrated prosecutors in The Hague are studying legal commentaries and precedents to determine what they should do if Tripoli throws a spanner in the works. The National Transitional Council has already announced that it intends to put Saif al-Islam on trial itself. Colonel Ahmed Bani, the military spokesman of the interim Libyan government, considers a trial in The Hague a “breach of sovereignty.” He wants Saif al-Islam in court in Libya to “suffer the consequences of his actions.”