October 10, 2009 - Daily Star - Special Tribunal not planning any imminent indictments

Court has signed no cooperation deals with countries save Lebanon

By Michael Bluhm
Daily Star staff

BEIRUT: The Special Tribunal for Lebanon will not indict any suspects soon – and if it did, it still does not have agreements with any country except Lebanon to take suspects into custody, tribunal officials said on Friday. More than four-and-a-half years after the February 2005 assassination of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri that led to the tribunal’s establishment, tribunal prosecutor Daniel Bellemare is not ready to present an indictment of possible perpetrators, said Belleamre’s spokeswoman Radhia Achouri.
“Indictments are not to be issued yet – that’s clear,” she told The Daily Star. “We are still working on the investigation.”
Tribunal officials have said throughout recent months that they were steeping up the tempo of the investigation into Hariri’s killing and the other acts of political violence in the tribunal’s mandate. In tribunal President Antonio Cassese’s first six-month report, released late last month, he said the court had “launched an operational surge aimed at increasing the pace of the investigation.”
Bellemare, in spite of spending more than two months at home in Canada this summer while receiving medical treatment for an undisclosed illness, is adding 30 to 40 staff members this year, and his team has undertaken 46 missions and done 180 interviews, the report added. Bellemare’s office employs the majority of the tribunal’s roughly 200 personnel.
Should the tribunal, however, decide to indict a suspect and want to take that person into custody, the court has not signed cooperation deals with any United Nations member state except Lebanon, said Peter Foster, the tribunal’s chief of public affairs and outreach. Cassese is negotiating a number of such agreements, but Foster said he could not reveal the nations involved or the status of talks.
Negotiations are “ongoing, and we don’t expect to have any problems,” Foster said.
Much attention in the case has focused on the tribunal’s cooperation with Syria, which many in the March 14 political coalition here have blamed in Hariri’s assassination and the string of political killings that have plagued Lebanon since October 2004. Damascus has categorically denied any involvement in the crimes, and Syrian President Bashar Assad has said he would not allow any Syrian citizen to go before the tribunal, which he said might be manipulated for political aims.
Without a cooperation agreement, however, neither Syria nor any other UN member state would have to pay attention to a tribunal request to detain a suspect.
UN member states “are urged to cooperate, but they are under no legal obligation to cooperate with us,” said Achouri. “The tribunal is not a UN tribunal for it to be having Chapter VII powers in the first place.” In brief, Chapter VII of the UN Charter requires member states to comply with particular UN Security Council resolutions.
Many tribunal observers have also pointed out that detaining suspects in Lebanon could also present a problem, if the individual were inside one of the country’s 12 Palestinian refugee camps. Under the 1969 Cairo Agreement, Lebanese security forces cannot enter the camps, and a number of Lebanese wanted by the authorities have taken advantage of the situation, many taking refuge in the Ain al-Hilweh camp in Sidon, the largest in Lebanon.
Some media attention on the tribunal this summer centered on interim agreement the tribunal concluded with Interpol, but Interpol does not and will not have the authority to take anyone into custody in connection with the tribunal, Foster said. Interpol will function mostly as database for the tribunal, sharing details on persons of interest to the tribunal, Foster added.
“It’s simply an information-sharing agreement,” he said. “It’s standard with all international tribunals. Interpol is a conduit for information.”
Interpol should approve a comprehensive deal with the tribunal when the organization holds its general assembly next week in Singapore, Achouri said.
At the tribunal’s headquarters in Holland’s The Hague, meanwhile, the administrative machinery is in place if Bellemare wants to indict anyone, Achouri and Foster said.
Bellemare has to submit any requests for indictment or detentions to the pretrial judge, who would then issue official indictments, and Judge Daniel Fransen has taken up residence in The Netherlands. “He is dutifully minding his post, and he is here every day,” Achouri said.
Although the tribunal, housed in a former Dutch intelligence-services office, is still creating a courtroom out of a former gymnasium on its premises, the court does have a facility to detain any persons taken into custody, Foster said. The question remains, however, when and how the tribunal will bring anyone into its custody.