THE judges who will begin trying Saddam Hussein tomorrow have been secretly trained in Britain in recent months, it emerged yesterday.

The International Bar Association confirmed that it had helped to train the 20 Iraqi judges who make up the Special Tribunal, including the five sitting for Saddam’s trial. Training was also held for 23 prosecutors.

The project, funded by the Department for International Development, included simulated trials at which the judges were split over whether life imprisonment or the death penalty should be imposed.

Stuart Alford, one of the British barristers who helped with the training, said: “The judges are all very experienced and some have considerable experience as trial judges. They know they have a great responsibility upon them and they have a great desire to do the right thing, by which I mean properly to enforce the rule of law.”

None had any experience of this kind of international law before, he said. However, that was the situation for most judges in comparable tribunals.

Mr Alford believed that, were Saddam to be found guilty, the death penalty would not be a foregone conclusion but that it would be likely. In the mock trials, with fictional scenarios based on mass murders, the 20 judges were divided on verdicts and sentences.

The panel of five that will try Saddam concluded that a local hypothetical commander who had “murdered 11 villagers” should be guilty of a “crime against humanity in the form of murder”, but that the sentence should be less than life imprisonment.

The judges are also concerned about the lack of clarity in the statute setting up the tribunal, which requires it to impose the death penalty for murder but gives it discretion if the finding is for a “crime against humanity”.

The training, run by judges and lawyers from countries including Sweden, the Netherlands, Australia, and America, was aimed at explaining international criminal law and how it could be seen in the context of the civil code system of criminal law in Iraq. The Iraqi judges were very keen to “set out why, as an Islamic country, they believed the death penalty to be entirely right,” Mr Alford said.

Saddam’s trial is expected to have a chaotic opening, with his main defence team absent and claims that the Special Tribunal appointed to hear the case has ignored basic legal procedures.

Abdul Haq al-Ani, the British-trained barrister appointed to defend the ousted Iraqi dictator, said that he had been denied access to his client, that the defence had not formally received details of the charges and that the court had not answered one defence application in the past year.

“It is a farce,” Mr al-Ani told The Times. “It is going to be a political show-trial.”

Saddam and seven members of his Baathist regime are to appear in court tomorrow morning to face 19 charges of killing 143 Iraqi civilians.

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