 AMMAN, Jordan (AP) - Saddam Hussein's lawyers are denied the same rights and resources as the prosecutors in his trial, a U.S.-based legal adviser to the deposed Iraqi leader said Sunday.
Curtis Doebbler said Saddam's legal team is at a disadvantage compared with the prosecution, which he said has spent $300 million and has "hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops and dozens of American lawyers to assist them." "All these resources have been deployed to collect evidence for more than two years" to build a case against Saddam, he said in a statement e-mailed by the Jordan-based defense team to The Associated Press.
By contrast, Doebbler said, Saddam's defense team "consists of volunteer lawyers without adequate resources or the ability to find experts (or) adequate witnesses." He said the defense cannot visit the sites of the alleged crimes "because of the state of insecurity in Iraq."
| So have your 'client' call off the insurgents. |
Doebbler, a Washington-based law professor specializing in international law, said the non-Iraqi lawyers for the defense "cannot even enter Iraq to visit their clients regularly." In Iraq, Saddam's attorneys are "held under virtual house arrest without access to telephones, faxes, computers, books, or any adequate facilities to do their work," he said. "Even their legal notes are read and only papers approved by American officials can be passed to their clients."
He rebuked human rights groups without citing any by name, saying they had failed to protest the conditions of Saddam's trial. "It is quite incredible that the international community silently watches a process that continues to violate more and more human rights," he said.
| They were more silent when Saddam was in charge. |
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