Daily Star - UN calls on Lebanese judges to quit for Hariri court roles, August 8, 2008

The international tribunal to try suspects in the assassination of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri is set to begin functioning "very soon," and the UN called the Lebanese judges in the court to resign from their domestic posts, a security source told The Daily Star on Thursday. "Canadian judge Daniel Bellemare, who heads the UN team investigating the political violence, is preparing his second report, which is expected to be decisive," said the source speaking on condition of anonymity. "The information to be included in the report will give the public opinion a notion about the party involved in Hariri's killing and the crimes that followed." According to the source, the report will constitute a "turning point in the course of the Hariri case." In his first report to the Security Council, Bellemare said the commission believed Hariri's killing and the other assassinations and assassination bids were "politically motivated." The source said the UN had sent a letter to the Lebanese government calling on it to inform Lebanese judges who had been chosen as members of the tribunal of the need to submit their resignation from the Lebanese judiciary and settle their indemnities. "Judges should eliminate any linkage with their Lebanese judicial work in order for them to work independently of political or financial influences," the source said. The source also related the imminent launching of the tribunal to the refusal of investigating prosecutor Saqr Saqr to free four army generals who have been held without charge since August 2005 in connection with Hariri's assassination. "This is the first time that the investigating prosecutor deals with the generals' repeated requests to be released," the source said.

Saqr on Wednesday turned down a request to free former Presidential Guard chief General Mustafa Hamdan, the former head of General Security General Jamil Sayyed, the former head of the Internal Security Forces General Ali Hajj and the former chief of army intelligence General Raymond Azar. But he agreed to release two of the nine suspects detained following Hariri's murder in a massive Beirut car bomb blast in February 2005, who had been held for giving false information. "All those factors indicate that we are [close to] the tribunal and that the commission has crucial information about the identity of the crimes' perpetrators," the source added. Meanwhile, a well-informed UN source said on Thursday that the main "knot" hampering the establishment of the court had been untied. "The necessary two-year financing of the tribunal's work has been ensured," the source said. "A big Arab country vowed to offer a sum that covers the court's expenses for six months, while other Arab and foreign countries provided amounts for one-and-a-half years." Registrar Robin Vincent of the Special Tribunal for Lebanon had previously told The Daily Star that the amount of the budget for the tribunal's first year would be around $45 million. The tribunal, created last May 30 by UN Security Council Resolution 1757, has a mandate encompassing assassinations and attempted assassinations from the failed bid to kill former Telecommunications Minister Marwan Hamadeh in October 2004 through the killing of Internal Security Forces Major Wissam Eid on January 25 this year.