Wednesday 27 February 2013

Ghulam Azam's trial

The prosecution have been placing arguments for the last seven days and would continue with placing the closing argument today. Earlier in the morning, the three-member tribunal rejected two prayers of Azam -- bail petition and taking written statement of Prof William Schabas and Gen Jack Deverell as defence testimony.

All quite predictable - the court doesn't need to hear from some random bideshis on their Liberation War. Sheikh Mujib told us that 3 million people have been killed, and everyone knows that JI leaders are all war ciminals. What else is there to it?

I for one would have been quite interested to see Schabas' statement - he seems like an interesting guy.

A bit more detail is available in this older article:

The International Crimes Tribunal (ICT)-1 today rejected an application of counsels of former Jamaat ameer Ghulam Azam, seeking tribunal summonses upon two of their foreign witnesses. "The defence can produce whoever they want as defence witnesses, but the total number should be 12. But we are not inspired to issue any summonses upon any defence witnesses," the tribunal said in the order rejecting the petition.
"As such the petition is rejected," the tribunal added.


Yesterday, during the hearing, chief prosecutor Golam Arif Tipu also strongly opposed the application and said the tribunal can seek expert opinion whenever it needs one, but no one can come in front by himself and ask the tribunal to take his opinion for the trial.

He also questioned about the legitimacy of their expert status and said "can a witness be called as an expert?"

"It has not been established so far that they are experts," Tipu said.


Yes, I mean, what would Schabas know about genocide? He's just the former president of the International Association of Genocide Scholars.

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