Thanks to Eli, who highlights that you can watch proceedings of the Peace Forum on criminalising war through Malaysiakini TV (I think here as well).
Mahathir also responds to questions regarding the composition of the War Crimes ‘Tribunal,’ which I was very preoccupied with some days ago. Seems pretty evasive and far from convincing to me, judge for yourself: the excerpts below. The rest of the article had some interesting moments too.
On the war crime tribunal, someone looking from the outside will say this is a kangaroo court filled with members that you know will vote a certain way.
No, these are ex-judges. These judges decide according to their principles. Of course, they cannot be biased, they have to listen entirely on evidence. The reason why we have to set this up – what will be called an NGO court – is because these people have tried to put their case to the ICC (International Criminal Court) for example, but they were not given a hearing.They have nowhere else to go so we have to do this and the judges who man the tribunal, they are experienced judges, they are retired, they have not given political opinion, they have not said anything about war crimes, they have a completely open mind.
We purposely invited the judges. If we want to, we can invite some people definitely against America but these judges have not expressed their opinion about America as far as I know, not from the Bench anyway.
But you have others personalities such as Ramsey Clark and Francis Boyle who have made very strong opinions on the issue before.
There are two stages, first there is the commission, the commission will receive the complaints from the people affected, the commission will study whether there is a prima facie case. If there is, the commission will put it before a tribunal, then there will be a proper trial. I do not know whether Ramsey Clark is in the tribunal or not (nat: see here) but they of course, have very strong views, but it is important to balance those with strong views also.
For a tribunal to be credible, we would want the panelists to be seen as independent rather than having people like Clark.
He is a person who has been on the other side, so he could see both sides. We should not pre-judge them. The main thing is will they make a decision based on evidence or will they make a decision even before they hear the evidence?
In the case of (former Iraqi president) Saddam Hussein, they already decided that he was going to be hanged. When the judges appeared to be sympathetic, they were removed. His lawyers were killed. Everything was done to make sure he would be hanged in the end – never even giving him time to appeal.
