August 18, 2009 - Daily Star - Lebanon appoints Joyce Tabet as STL deputy state prosecutor

Judge has yet to join special tribunal due to UN ?foot dragging?

By Michael Bluhm
Daily Star staff

BEIRUT: Lebanon has appointed Deputy State Prosecutor Joyce Tabet to the post of deputy prosecutor at the UN Special Tribunal for Lebanon, but she has yet to join the court because of negotiations over her contract, a number of tribunal and Lebanese judiciary sources said on Monday. Tabet told The Daily Star she still had “no idea” when she would take up her position, although tribunal officials confirmed almost three weeks ago that Lebanon had selected Tabet and the administrative process of adding her to the court had begun. The post of deputy prosecutor is reserved for a Lebanese national at the tribunal, which was established by a UN Security Council resolution to try suspects in the February 2005 assassination of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri.
Tabet has worked on the investigation of Hariri’s killing for years and has long cooperated with the UN commission looking into the assassination, the judicial sources said. All the sources said Tabet had a spotless professional reputation.
A tribunal spokesman said Tabet’s appointment was purely a human-resources issue in the hands of the UN’s Office of Legal Affairs, but several calls to the office’s New York headquarters went unanswered.
The Lebanese sources said the delay in Tabet joining the tribunal reflected a pattern of UN foot-dragging on appointments to the tribunal, and former Justice Minister Charles Rizk said the UN had moved glacially to appoint Daniel Bellemare, who headed the probe commission, to the post of prosecutor.
“When I was in the Cabinet, I was trying to urge the UN to ac¬celerate the nomination of the prosecutor,” he said. “The procrastination which took place came from the UN, not from us.”
Bellemare, meanwhile, has left the tribunal headquarters in a suburb of Holland’s The Hague to undergo medical treatment in his native Canada since early July for an unspecified illness. Bellemare’s absence, however, is not delaying Tabet’s appointment or the pace of the investigation, said Peter Foster, the tribunal’s chief of public affairs and outreach. His absence is also not contributing to the ongoing wait for Tabet to join the court, Foster added.
“There is no delay whatsoever in the office of the prosecutor with Mr. Bellemare being in Canada,” he said, adding that Bellemare was in “daily, if not hourly contact” with his office. The investigation “is actually picking up,” Foster said.
Hariri’s February 14, 2005, assassination led to the exit of Syrian troops from Lebanon after 29 years, and the UN tribunal to try his killers long stood as one of the key issues polarizing Lebanon’s anti-Syrian March 14 and Syrian-backed March 8 political camps. March 14 figures have accused Damascus of Hariri’s killing and for the string of assassinations and attempted assassinations which continued to bedevil the country, while the Syrian regime of President Bashar Assad has denied any role in the violence and has said it will not allow its citizens to appear before the tribunal.
Syrian Foreign Minister Walid al-Moallem said the tribunal had been used as a political tool against Damascus, saying Syria had received and rejected “bargain offers” to terminate the tribunal in exchange for ending the presidential vacuum in Lebanon in late 2007 and early 2008. Despite the ongoing media fanfare surrounding the tribunal’s activity, a number of insiders in the international justice community have said that any potential verdicts remain years away.
Anyone indicted by the tribunal, regardless of nationality, will certainly raise legal challenges to the tribunal’s legitimacy in advance of any potential trials, lawyers have said. Defendants will question the circumstances of the tribunal’s founding, the Security Council’s au¬thority connected with the court and the Lebanese Parliament’s failure to approve the bilateral treaty establishing the tribunal, the legal insiders added.