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Lebanon Paper Launches Salvo Against Hariri Tribunal

A spokesman for the United Nations-backed Special Tribunal for Lebanon quickly condemned the publication, in January, as a serious breach of court rules that put the lives of those named at risk.

But the response of the newspaper, Al Akhbar, which is close to the militant movement Hezbollah, was defiant. A few days later it published a second confidential list, splashing the names, pictures and personal details of another 15 possible witnesses across two pages.

The newspaper’s actions seemed to underscore the lengths to which opponents of the tribunal will go to undermine its mandate: to investigate who was behind the powerful car bomb that killed the former Lebanese prime minister, Rafik Hariri, and 22 others in 2005. The leaks raise the likelihood that witnesses may be silenced by fear or coercion, which could seriously weaken the prosecution’s case.

The witnesses’ names “were clearly published with the idea of scaring people and preventing any cooperation with the court,” said a lawyer who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he is linked to the trial. “The editors called the court’s bluff, because they know they won’t be arrested.”

Al Akhbar has long campaigned against the tribunal, which is based in the Netherlands for security reasons. The tribunal has charged four Hezbollah members, although their whereabouts is unknown and the current plan is for them to be tried in absentia.

Hezbollah, the strongest faction in Lebanon’s government, has denied any involvement in the bombing, denounced the tribunal as a tool of the United States and Israel and has warned that it will never allow the arrest of its members.

According to the indictment, the men are linked to Mr. Hariri’s death based on extensive telephone records, including calls made just before a huge bomb killed the political leader as his armored car drove down a seaside boulevard in Beirut.

Early reports pointed to high-level Syrian participation in the assassination, but prosecutors have not disclosed new evidence of such a link. But the possible involvement of Hezbollah militants has enormously complicated the challenge facing the tribunal, which is preparing to start its first trial since it opened in 2009. Hezbollah is not only part of Lebanon’s governing coalition but also has its own powerful military force.

Further, if the long-delayed trial goes ahead, it is expected to revive the perennial debate about whether the pursuit of justice can do more harm than good, in this case compounding political tensions or even provoking more bloody clashes between Hezbollah and its pro-Western rivals at home.

However, some experts believe that the court’s potential as a catalyst for unrest has now been largely overshadowed by the Syrian civil war, raging a few hours’ drive from Beirut. The conflict has already mobilized competing political players in Lebanon, with different factions sending fighters to both sides of the war in Syria.

Even so, Al Akhbar’s identification of possible witnesses has stirred controversy in Beirut.

“This was another form of sabotage of the tribunal; there’s been a long campaign to prove it’s not credible,” said May Chidiac, a former television news anchor. Ms. Chidiac was moving slowly among guests at a dinner recently because she lost part of an arm and a leg when a bomb exploded under her car several months after Mr. Hariri’s assassination. Her case also remains unsolved.

Facing criticism, the editor of Al Akhbar, Ibrahim al-Amin, wrote that naming witnesses was “part of what the public is entitled to know.” He argued that the leak was no different from the many past disclosures about the Hariri investigation published in Lebanon or abroad. Yet, while court documents and details about the investigation have indeed appeared before, this was the first public disclosure of potential witnesses.

Mr. Amin also suggested that it was an act of retaliation. Al Akhbar had published the list, he wrote, in response to “the international campaign of fabrication targeting the resistance,” meaning Hezbollah.

That appeared to be a reference to the current efforts by Israel and the United States to have the European Union designate Hezbollah a terrorist organization. This would mean cracking down on its travel and fund-raising across the Continent.

The tribunal’s formal response to Al Akhbar has been low key. Martin Youssef, a spokesman, said a letter had been sent to Lebanon’s attorney general, asking him to inform the newspaper of its violations. He said the court would not comment on whether anyone the newspaper identified was a witness. “But the effect is the same,” he said. “This is meant to intimidate all witnesses.”

Safety of witnesses has been a thorny issue for all the new international criminal courts. All have witness protection programs, but they mostly depend on local authorities for enforcement.

At the United Nations tribunals for Rwanda and Yugoslavia, journalists and lawyers have been tried for contempt of court over the revelation of names or confidential transcripts of protected witnesses. Some have had to pay fines or serve prison sentences.

“It’s a very serious issue,” said Abbe Jolles, an American defense lawyer who has worked at the Rwanda court, “a number of times people have withdrawn as witnesses after their names came out.”

The Hariri trial, provisionally scheduled to start in The Hague on March 25, is again expected to be delayed. Defense lawyers have complained that the prosecution has not yet disclosed all of its evidence, that the electronic database is not fully operating and that the Lebanese government has ignored all their requests for information.

“Now we wonder if there will be any witnesses,” said one researcher who has worked for the court.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/10/world/middleeast/lebanon-paper-launches-salvo-against-hariri-tribunal.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Cameron to Outline a Recast European Role for Britain

Weighted down by centuries of entrenched wariness in this island nation toward the Continent — and the knowledge that a gallery of his predecessors as Conservative prime ministers saw their tenures blighted by divisions within the party over the issue — Mr. Cameron is heading for Amsterdam on Friday to set out his vision of a sharply whittled-down role for Britain in the affairs of 21st-century Europe.

The speech in the Netherlands, carefully chosen as a country with a strong historical friendship with Britain, is a watershed moment for Mr. Cameron, and for Britain. It could be a deeply jarring occasion, as well, for other European nations, which have grown increasingly impatient, angry even, with Britain’s policy during the crisis in the euro zone. Some European officials have described as blackmail its use of the crisis — one that Britain, with the pound, has largely escaped — to demand a new, “pick-and-mix” status for itself within the 27-nation European Union.

After months of delay, Mr. Cameron is expected to brush aside the warnings of the Obama administration and European leaders and call for a referendum on whether Britain should remain squarely in Europe or negotiate a more arm’s-length relationship, most likely before the next Parliament’s mandate expires in 2018. In a clamorous House of Commons on Wednesday, the prime minister set out his thinking.

“Millions of people in this country, myself included, want Britain to stay in the European Union,” he said. “But they believe that there are chances to negotiate a better relationship. Throughout Europe, countries are looking at forthcoming treaty change, and asking, ‘What can I do to maximize my national interest?’ That is what the Germans will do. That is what the Spanish will do. That is what the British should do.”

For months, Mr. Cameron has been holding off on a promise to explain just what he wants from Europe. As a reformist Conservative pressing ahead with, among other things, a plan to legalize gay marriage, he has scant common ground with the “little Englanders” in his party, the core of about 100 members who make up a third of its representation in Parliament.

But Mr. Cameron can see votes, too, in the strong anti-Europe currents that run wherever people in Britain gather.

In pubs and bars, on radio and in Parliament itself, talk of the European Union tends to center on the bloc’s real — and, in some cases, apocryphal — abuses: its highhanded, bloated bureaucracy, with nearly 1,000 featherbedded officials earning more than Mr. Cameron’s $230,000 salary as prime minister; its endless proliferation of rules on everything from the length of dog leashes to the shape of carrots; the recent claim by a former high-ranking Cameron aide that government ministers spend 40 percent of their time dealing with the mass of pettifogging European “directives,” many of them widely ignored elsewhere in Europe.

Not only has Mr. Cameron been hemmed in by deep divisions over Europe within the Conservative Party — an issue that helped unseat Edward Heath, Margaret Thatcher and John Major as prime ministers — but he has also been wary of stirring a fresh wave of anger among other European leaders, particularly Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, a center-right politician and onetime ally in European councils.

Her aides have described her as frustrated with Mr. Cameron’s maneuvering and, as she is said to see it, his bid to take advantage of other European states as they struggle to save the euro and keep the most debt-laden nations, like Greece, Portugal and Spain, from dropping out of the European Union.

Concern about the reactions in Berlin and Paris prompted a last-minute rescheduling of the Amsterdam speech. Germany and France had protested that the original date, next Monday, might overshadow long-planned celebrations that day of the 50th anniversary of the treaty between them, itself a landmark in the building of postwar Europe, that sealed their reconciliation after the wounds of World War II.

Along with this, commentators say, Mr. Cameron has been recalculating the ways in which the European issue can be managed to bolster the Conservatives’ sagging prospects in a general election expected in 2015, in which polls show them lagging as much as 13 percentage points behind the opposition Labour Party. He has also been contending with heavy lobbying by American officials, including President Obama.

The Americans, diplomats say, have told Mr. Cameron squarely in private what made headlines here last week when a senior State Department official, Philip Gordon, who is assistant secretary for European affairs, spoke on the issue with British reporters. Mr. Gordon said a continued “strong British voice” in an “outward-looking” European Union was in America’s interests, and warned specifically against the referendum on Europe that is an important component in Mr. Cameron’s plans. “Referendums,” Mr. Gordon said, “have often turned countries inward.”

For all his delaying, his aides say, Mr. Cameron is ready now to outline a strategy for renegotiating Britain’s status in the European Union in a way that would keep Britain free from the centralizing forces at work. Other major European states, France and Germany in particular, see a new federal Europe with enhanced powers of fiscal oversight as essential to the long-term survival of the tottering euro.

Alan Cowell contributed reporting from Paris, and Stephen Castle from London.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/17/world/europe/cameron-to-outline-a-recast-european-role-for-britain.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Lebanon Paper Launches Salvo Against Hariri Tribunal

Cameron to Outline a Recast European Role for Britain

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