Judges at the Special Tribunal for Lebanon Wednesday adjourned thein absentia trial against five men accused of participating in the 2005 assassination of former Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri “for the immediate and foreseeable future.”
 
Presiding Judge David Re said lawyers for the accused and the prosecution will meet regularly in the coming weeks to discuss when the trial can resume. The adjournment comes on the heels of a Tuesday decision by the trial chamber to join two cases related to the 2005 attack.
 
Mohamed Aouini, lead counsel for Hassan Merhi, argued in court that he will need at least “four to six months” to prepare an estimate for when his team will be ready for trial. Merhi, 48, was indicted by the tribunal confidentially on July 31, 2013, over two years after the court indicted Mustafa Badreddine, 52, Salim Ayyash, 50, Hussein Oneissi, 39, and Assad Sabra, 37. All five are members of the Syrian- and Iranian-backed Shiite movement Hezbollah.
 
Merhi’s lawyers were only appointed in December of 2013 and, they argue, have not had adequate time to inspect the prosecutor’s full case file, which includes over 750,000 pages of material plus several terabytes of call data records, which require special expertise to interpret and analyze.
 
Lawyers for Badreddine, Ayyash, Oneissi, and Sabra have been preparing for trial since they were appointed in February 2012. In fact, the trial against Badreddine, Ayyash, Oneissi, and Sabra began on January 16, 2014. Joining the cases means that Merhi is also now on trial.
 
STL Spokesman Marten Youssef told NOW that the adjournment is not a delay in the trial, as an adjournment is a normal part of the trial process.
 
“There’s going to be a flurry of activity” as defense lawyers, the prosecution, and judges meet to discuss when the trial can resume. Additionally, Judge Re ordered both Merhi’s defense lawyers and the prosecution to file various documents over the next few weeks.
 
At the hearing on Wednesday – the purpose of which was to discuss how long the adjournment should last – Judge Re offered several possibilities for how to move forward.
 
During a January 9, 2014 pre-trial conference, Graeme Cameron argued the prosecution’s case can be roughly divided into “the fairly uncontentious [sic] evidence and the more contentious evidence.” The uncontroversial portion being evidence related to witness statements about the day of the attack, and the contentious evidence being forensic evidence related to the bombing and evidence allegedly linking the five accused to phones believe to be used to monitor and kill Hariri along with 21 others.
 
The prosecution argued that an adjournment would fit best as it moves to more contentious evidence. In court on Wednesday, Alexander Milne, for the prosecution, said that only seven or eight more witnesses are left to be called to court as part of the less contentious portion of their case.
 
Judge Re suggested the adjournment could either happen as one solid block of time or could happen essentially in phases. He suggested the possibility of giving Merhi’s defense some time to prepare and then continuing proceedings with the less contentious evidence then breaking again before allowing the prosecution to continue presenting the contentious evidence at a slower pace (i.e., holding hearings only three days per week instead of five).
 
Phillip la Rochelle, a defense lawyer for Oneissi, argued that the prosecution’s division of its case is, ultimately, “artificial.” He called it a “straight jacket on the Merhi team,” arguing it is not for the prosecution, rather Merhi’s lawyers, to decide what evidence is or is not contentious.
 
Merhi’s lead counsel, Aouini, argued that limiting the period of the adjournment and proceeding slowly after the adjournment would deprive his team of fully understanding the entirety of the prosecution’s case, thus putting them at a disadvantage in defending Merhi’s rights.
 
“We need full mastery of the case file before getting into a debate” on the merits of evidence or witness testimony, he said.
 
Judge Re did not indicate when a decision on the adjournment’s length will be made.
https://now.mmedia.me/lb/en/stl-updates/535229-stl-trial-adjourned