ANTHONY SCRIVENER, QC, was preparing yesterday for one of the biggest and unenviable cases in legal history after agreeing to defend Saddam Hussein.

The leading British criminal barrister, who has participated in more than a hundred murder cases, has agreed to represent the former Iraqi dicator, whose long-awaited trial is due to start in Iraq next week.

The case, regarded by most lawyers as the brief from hell, has yet to be confirmed, but Mr Scrivener’s clerk, Martin Hart, said yesterday that the QC had been approached to head Saddam’s legal team.

Mr Scrivener was approached by an Iraqi exile, Abdel Haq al-Ani, who has lived in Britain for about 20 years and is a legal consultant. Mr al-Ani has also approached Desmond Doherty, a well-known Londonderry solicitor who worked on the Bloody Sunday inquiry.

The two men are part of an international team being assembled by Saddam’s eldest daughter, Raghad, who fled from Iraq to Jordan with her sister, Rana, after the collapse of her father’s regime 2½ years ago. Others advising the team include Ramsay Clark, a former US Attorney-General, Mahathir Mohamad, former Malaysian Prime Minister, and Aysha Muammar Gaddafi, daughter of the Libyan leader.

Saddam’s daughter’s devotion has surprised some observers because Saddam had Raghad’s husband, Hussein Kamal, executed after he revealed the extent of the dictator’s efforts to rebuild his arsenal of non-conventional weapons in the mid-1990s. For a while Raghad, her mother and sister — who was married to Kamal’s brother, who also briefly defected — were held under house arrest on suspicion of aiding their husbands.

Saddam and several associates face 19 charges initially, centring on the 1982 massacre of 143 people in the town of Dujail, north of Baghdad.The defence team’s leading lawyer, Ziad al-Khasawneh, quit after accusing Raghad of meddling in the work of the 1,500-strong team of legal workers and volunteers, in particular of favouring American and non-Arab lawyers over their Arab counterparts. Mr al-Khasawneh, a nationalist who believes that Saddam is the rightful President of Iraq, said that Raghad removed the files relating to Saddam’s case from his office while he was on a trip in Libya.

Because Saddam’s assets are frozen, his daughters and the defence team have complained that they do not have the money to mount a defence. They have accused the Iraqi Special Tribunal, the court set up by the US occupation authority, of lacking the right to try the deposed leader. They have also accused the authorities of obstructing access to Saddam. The Iraqi court has denied the allegations.

Mr Scrivener, a youthful 70, is one of the best-known criminal silks at the Bar, with a practice spanning more than 30 years. A former Bar chairman, his most recent prominent case was that of Sion Jenkins, the schoolmaster who is to be tried a third time for the murder of his foster daughter, Billie-Jo.

An old-style jury advocate with an easy, unpompous manner and popular touch, Mr Scrivener is expected, as a first task in the Saddam case, to challenge the jurisdiction of the tribunal. One of the first charges facing the former dicator is that he signed the death warrant for 147 Iraqis. The QC is expected to point out that death warrants are signed by other heads of state routinely, notably George Bush.

He spends most of his time working from his home in Suffolk with his second wife. He has grown-up children from his first marriage.

His other memorable cases include the Guildford Four, Winston Silcott, the Guinness trial and the miners’ strike. He is a staunch libertarian who wears his radicalism lightly. Humour remains his trademark. He boasts that he knows every depravity, especially after an early practice in divorce work. “I used to brag that I knew every sexual perversion — in Latin,” he once remarked.

He is also teetotal. With the prospect of a trial that could last a year, that mix of humour and sobriety could be just what he needs to get by.

DICTATOR IN DOCK

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