Sadam Hussain did not get a `fair trial’ according to the group Human Rights Watch, who claim that:
But HRW said it had documented “serious administrative, procedural and substantive legal defects” that meant he did not get a fair trial.
I have not followed this case closely enough to say either way whether the verdict appears to me sound, but the grounds of their claims that the trial was `unfair’ raise a question in my mind: have we not begun to lose the proper sense of what we mean by a `fair trial’.
Perhaps we are mislead by sports: in a sports game, we consider a `fair’ challenge one in which both sides have an equal chance of winning at the start. In golf, indeed, this is even institutionalised to the extent that players of very different skill levels can play a match that either might win.
But a `fair’ trial is not the same thing at all. The ultimate aim is not to give the defendant a sporting chance of escaping, but to air the evidence against the defendant, giving him a proper chance to challenge it. In a `fair’ trial, the innocent should be reasonably certain of being found not guilty, and the guilty should be reasonably certain of being found guilty. The successful appeal of otherwise sound verdicts on purely technical grounds harms confidence in the administration of justice.
All that said, technicalities are important. They are all that stand between the innocent and conviction on fabricated evidence that is difficult or impossible to challenge. That is why certain types of evidence, certain actions of the prosecutor and judge and so forth are, quite rightly, prohibited. But it is important not to lose sight of the ultimate aim: the conviction, as far as is humanly possible, of the guilty and only them.
From the very start of the 1946 Nuremberg trials, few of the defendants had any real prospect of escaping guilty verdicts - and that was, in all but a few of their cases - exactly how it should have been.