THE HAGUE: Libya has enough evidence to charge Muammar Qaddafi’s son Seif Al-Islam with crimes against humanity, lawyers told the International Criminal Court yesterday. While the ICC wants Seif, the only son of the slain Libyan leader in custody, to be tried in The Hague, Libya’s post-revolutionary authorities insist he should stand trial in his home country.
A probe “has already produced considerable results,” Libya lawyer Philippe Sands told a two-day hearing on Seif’s fate. “There is a wide range of evidence that will constitute an indictment the same as that presented by the ICC’s prosecutor.”
The ICC issued an arrest warrant for Seif, 40, and Qaddafi’s former spymaster Abdullah Senussi, 63, in June 2011 for crimes against humanity allegedly committed while trying to crush the popular revolt against the veteran leader’s iron-fisted rule.
ICC defense lawyers are expected to argue that Seif would not get a fair trial in Libya, where he could face the death penalty, but the ICC prosecutor’s office said Libya’s prosecution of Seif and Senussi appeared to be on course. “We see that the case being presented appears to be on track,” prosecutor Sara Criscitelli told the ICC’s three-judge bench. “We believe that Libya is interested in prosecuting this offender... we are confident that Libya needs a bit more time to sort itself out,” she said. Evidence against Seif includes how he allegedly told Libyan security forces during a television broadcast to use violence shortly after the outbreak of the uprising in mid-February last year, Libya’s lawyer Sands said. Tripoli also alleges that Seif ordered the use of live rounds against civilian demonstrators and that he recruited mercenaries to put down the revolt.
Seif has been in custody in the northwestern Libyan hilltown of Zintan since his arrest last November in the wake of the uprising that toppled his father after more than 40 years in power.
Senussi was extradited to Libya last month from Mauritania, where he was arrested in March as he tried to enter the country from Morocco using a Malian passport under a different name.
Tripoli and the ICC have been at loggerheads since his capture over where Seif Al-Islam’s should be tried, with Libya’s new leaders saying they want him in the dock before one of their courts.
“The government of Libya is committed to carrying out a fair trial for any ex-Qaddafi government official,” Tripoli’s lawyer Ahmed al-Jehani told the ICC.
“We will create a judicial system that is fair and this will prove our commitment to the rule of law,” Jehani said of his country’s burgeoning post-revolutionary administration.
But, Jehani said, this was a “complicated process and Libya needed more time” to put Seif and other Qaddafi loyalists on trial, something that would contribute to reconciliation in the North African nation.