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will they kill him?
Most interesting. Lets see what NATO and its supporters do here. Code Pink is on my dial right fucking now.
Thanks for the heads up. Can you put this thread in politics and lets see if Obama orders this man's death?
Muammar Gaddafi's most prominent son is being held by a militia from the town of Zintan at a secret location. In a ruling, the ICC said Libya must start making arrangements to hand him over to the war crimes court at The Hague immediately.
Saif al-Islam is wanted in connection with the violent suppression of protests during the Libyan uprising. Libya's governing National Transitional Council has said it wants to try him in the country.
It questioned the admissibility of the case to the war crimes court in an attempt to delay the handover, but the ICC said the Libyan authorities had failed to offer the necessary evidence. The court issued the arrest warrant for Saif al-Islam, as well as his father and the former intelligence chief, Abdullah al-Senussi, in June.
Mr Senussi was arrested last month in Mauritania and Libya is also keen to try him at home. But the ICC says a UN Security Council resolution obliges Libya to co-operate with the court and hand the men over to international justice.
BBC News - Hague court demands transfer of Saif al-Islam Gaddafi
The diametrically opposed positions came at an International Criminal Court hearing that will go a long way to deciding whether Seif al-Islam Gadhafi will be put on trial in Tripoli or The Hague. The legal tug-of-war over Seif al-Islam also is a key test for a founding principle of the war crimes tribunal: known as "complementarity," the principle states that the court can only try suspects from nations unable or unwilling to launch their own prosecutions. ICC prosecutors charged Seif al-Islam last year with murder and persecution for his alleged involvement in the deadly crackdown on dissent against his father's four-decade rule.
But months later authorities in Libya arrested Seif al-Islam and said they want to prosecute him. Prosecutors in The Hague now say they are willing to hand the case to authorities in Tripoli. While prosecutors and judges are both part of the court, they operate independently of one another and judges do not have to follow the prosecutors' advice. Where Gadhafi's son ends up being tried is not only a matter of national importance to Libya's new rulers. It's also of huge consequence to Seif al-Islam himself: if he were to be tried and convicted in The Hague, he could face a maximum life sentence, but if a Libyan court were to find him guilty he could face the death penalty.
Libya remains in turmoil almost a year after Gadhafi's ouster and rival armed militias still pose a serious threat to security in the country. Seif al-Islam is being held by a militia in the town of Zintan. Libyan lawyer Ahmed al-Jehani, who represented the Libyan government at the court, pledged that Tripoli would give him a fair trial. It would "be a unique opportunity for national reconciliation for a community that wishes to have justice done at home in Libya," he said. Al-Jehani said that a "rush to judgment" by the ICC would "render the principle of complementarity meaningless."
But one of Seif al-Islam's court-appointed defense lawyers, Melinda Taylor, said the court should not trust Libya and its fledgling justice system to mount a fair prosecution of the son and one-time heir apparent of the country's widely reviled former leader. Taylor was jailed in Libya for more than three weeks earlier this year, after being accused by Libyan authorities of passing confidential documents to her client. She said she wound up in jail after trusting Libyan assurances her visit was privileged, meaning she would not be arrested. Taylor warned that if the court also trusts Libyan guarantees and sends the case to Tripoli, Seif al-Islam "stands to lose his life in a completely arbitrary manner that has nothing to do with justice."
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Judges at the ICC on Friday rejected Libya's claim that the tribunal has no right to try Gadhafi because Tripoli intends to try him. Libya argues that the international court can intervene only if the local legal system is not up to the task.
ICC judges said Libyan government lawyers have not proved that their authorities are investigating the same crimes as the international prosecutors. They also questioned whether Libya has full custody over Saif al-Islam, something it would need if it were to try him.
The 40-year-old son of the former dictator is being held by rebel captors in the western mountain city of Zintan, where the power of the central government is weak. The ICC wants to try him for alleged crimes committed during the 2011 uprising that toppled his father.
Libya to Fight ICC Demand for Gadhafi's Son
The prize of former rebel fighters who triumphed in catching him as he tried to flee the country, Saif al-Islam Gaddafi is being kept in a secret location somewhere among Zintan's sandstone and concrete buildings. The one-time heir apparent remains out of reach of the government in Tripoli and even further from the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague, which also wants to try him. His captors, distrustful of a government they say is failing the state, say any tribunal he will face should be in Zintan.
If the country's leaders do not hold a trial soon over crimes committed before and during the 2011 uprising that toppled his father, they will do so themselves, they say. "If there is no trial for him, the Libyan people will bring him to justice," said Alajmi Ali Ahmed al-Atiri, the man who led the patrol that caught Saif al-Islam in the Sahara desert. "We will give the Libyan government a chance to bring him to trial. If they delay it, frankly we will say that we, as Libyan revolutionaries, will bring Saif to the revolutionary court. It will be a public and just trial."
Such declarations highlight the limited power the central government has on the fighters who chased out Gaddafi and now believe they deserve to be the real beneficiaries of the 2011 uprising. Zintan, a dusty Arab garrison town sprawled atop a steep-walled plateau in the mainly ethnic Berber Western Mountains, played an outsized role in the 2011 war. Two years ago, its fighters came down from the highlands, broke Gaddafi's defences along the coast and led the charge into Tripoli. Today, they remain organised and contemptuous of a central administration that, faced with assassinations, attacks on national and Western targets and a mass jail break, is losing its grip over the oil-producing state.
Tripoli is already involved in a legal dispute with The Hague, which is seeking Saif al-Islam for war crimes. But the real tussle is at home, where the government has unsuccessfully tried to move him to a specially-built jail in the capital. His impending trial, whenever and wherever it may be, will be emblematic of who has the real power on the ground - the frontline rebels who fought Gaddafi's forces or Tripoli's politicians, who already face increasing popular discontent. "The ball is now in the government's court and the government is very fragile - it is probably going through its most fragile phase ever in this transition," Human Rights Watch Libya researcher Hanan Salah said. "This is a case of one very prominent detainee but think about the so many more detainees being held by other militias that are given some sort of legitimacy or not. It showcases where the country is at in this stage of its transition."
"MICKEY MOUSE TRIALS"
