By Niamh Fleming-Farrell
BEIRUT: The in-absentia trial of four men accused of involvement in the 2005 assassination of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri should commence before the end of 2013, the Special Tribunal for Lebanon’s Defense Unit head, Francois Roux, has told The Daily Star.
“I think that very soon the pretrial judge will issue a decision that will set up a new, and not [a] tentative – it will be the final – date for the trial to start this year,” Roux said in an interview Tuesday at the close of a weeklong routine visit to Lebanon.
The previous start date, tentatively set for March 25, was postponed in February by pretrial Judge Daniel Fransen following a request from the defense, which cited the prosecution’s failure to disclose all relevant documents and the volume and disorganization of the evidence that was received among its reasons.
“We cannot be ready for the trial to start unless the prosecutor discloses all the material he needs to disclose to us, and also unless the registrar is ready to provide all technical support and technical software for us to ... be able to examine the technical material provided by the OTP [office of the prosecution] at the court,” Roux said, referring to the cause of the delays.
In a March 8 submission on the subject of a new start date, the defense had said it would be premature to suggest one at that time, but Roux maintained optimism that the trial would begin before the close of the calendar year.
The prosecution has now indicated it would complete its disclosure by June, while the registrar has said it would be ready for trial by September, he said.
But even if the long-awaited trial appears increasingly imminent, the Hague-based court has encountered other obstacles to its pursuit of justice.
Following the publication in the Lebanese press of alleged confidential witness lists on a number of occasions in recent months, the court has announced it will appoint an independent investigator to probe the matter.
Warning against characterizing these so-called witness lists as “leaks,” and then employing the term regardless, Roux denied such lists could have originated from within the defense unit.
“I want to make it very clear the defense counsel did not have this list of alleged witnesses that has been leaked to the press. ... It is impossible for the defense counsel to have leaked this list because they did not have it, it was never disclosed to them,” he said.
But Roux’s remarks indicated that some of the names in the defense’s possession may overlap with the 167 alleged witness names released in April by hackers of Al-Mustaqbal newspaper’s website and on a website called “Journalists for the Truth.”
“The defense counsel had only a few of the names that were on this alleged list, that were disclosed to them earlier by the prosecutor, but we did not have all the names on the list,” he said.
However, when pressed on whether any of the names published by Journalists for the Truth were among the more that 550 names the prosecution confidentially filed to the court in its pretrial brief on Nov. 15 last year, Roux was adamant there was no overlap.
“Let it be very clear that the list of expert names and witnesses that has been disclosed by the prosecution to the defense is totally different from the list that has been leaked to the hackers’ website,” he said.
Roux himself has no access to the confidential list in question. As head of the Defense Unit, his role is to appoint and support the defense counsel, but his office does not play an active part in representing the accused.
However, under the terms governing confidential filings to the court, the defense counsel should have access to the list. Indeed, the STL has previously told The Daily Star that prosecution’s witness list annex has been disclosed to the defense counsel.
Yet, in addition to claiming the prosecution’s annex is “totally different” to the alleged leaked list, Roux acknowledged Tuesday the defense counsel has said it is not in possession of the complete witness list.
“The annex of the pretrial brief containing a list of experts’ and witnesses’ names has been disclosed to the defense counsel, but the defense counsel complained that some names were still redacted from that list,” Roux said.
Addressing the issue of the court’s credibility being called into question in light of so-called leaks, the defense head was keen to discourage premature assumptions.
“There are too many possibilities for the sources of the leaks. What is important is to wait for the results of this independent investigation. It is not wise to rush to conclusions or to accuse anyone,” he said.
But, in relation to the matter, Roux also drew attention to a French expression. “There is a proverb in France that says ‘Who will benefit from the crime, or the violation?’
“We should think and consider in whose interest it is to discredit the STL,” Roux said, adding: “Is it useful for the STL to discredit its own self as an entity?”
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16/05/2013
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