Legal Jurisdictions

Sheila Carapico

doi:10.1017/CBO9781139022781.002

1 - Legal Jurisdictions

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2014

Sheila Carapico

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Sheila Carapico: Affiliation:
University of Richmond

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On December 30, 2006, Saddam Hussein al-Takriti was hanged by a noose around his neck after being convicted of ordering a massacre of Iraqi citizens in 1982 in a place called Dujail. The videotape broadcast worldwide showed witnesses jeering as his body convulsed through the gallows. The trial had been an exercise in legal pluralism, the multicultural intermingling of legal orders. It dramatized some complexities of international interventions in the rule-of-law sector. The tyrant was captured by American forces and sentenced by an Iraqi High Tribunal organized and financed by the Occupying Authority. He was not charged with genocide, war crimes, or crimes against humanity under international law. Nor was he indicted for all his administrations’ atrocities. Rather, the verdict was rendered under the 1969 Iraqi Penal Code derived from an antecedent law promulgated by Great Britain under its League of Nations mandate and consistent with the Napoleonic code introduced by the Ottomans in their Mesopotamian provinces. Conducted in Arabic and Kurdish by Iraqi judges and prosecutors, the proceedings reflected Ottoman, customary, French, British, and Egyptian influences on Iraq’s courts system, and some American elements, but not more recent precedents, norms, and mechanisms in international criminal prosecution.

Few other initiatives were as sensationally fraught as the one culminating in this gruesome death chamber spectacle, and very rarely are foreign interventions as determinant as the American role in the Dujail proceedings. Yet multicultural legal systems and evolving transnational norms frequently call into question what system of laws applies in what circumstances. Inevitably probing the shifting confluence of municipal and transnational jurisdictions, legal development projects in post-colonial states and the Palestinian territories often confronted ambiguities between and among layers of judicial authority. Scholars posed these contradictions between law as a bulwark against police states and law as a tool of empire.

Type: Chapter
Information: Political Aid and Arab Activism
Democracy Promotion, Justice, and Representation
, pp. 23 - 62

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139022781.002 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 2013

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