BY NORM DIXON
Professor Hans Koechler, the UN secretary-general's observer to Libyan citizen Abdelbaset Ali Mohamed al Megrahi's appeal hearing against his conviction for murder of the 270 people killed in the 1988 Lockerbie air disaster, on March 26 condemned the rejection of Megrahi's appeal as "not a victory for justice, but for power politics".
Megrahi was convicted by a special juryless court in the Netherlands, presided over by three Scottish judges and conducted according to Scottish law, on January 31. Five Scottish law lords in the same special Netherlands court eventually rejected Megrahi's appeal on March 14.
In his 25-page report, Professor Koechler concluded that the appeal proceedings were not fair because:
- the appeal judges "chose a kind of 'evasive' strategy" of not scrutinising the "plausibility and logical consistency" of the trial judges' verdict, nor did they question the "arbitrariness of the evaluation of evidence" of the trial judges;
- the appeal judges adopted "an attitude of USELESS WORD?: effective denial of responsibility that made the entire process a highly formal, artificial and abstract undertaking not related to the search for truth (an essential requirement of justice) and rendered the appeal proceedings virtually meaningless";
- the appeal judges did not "pay adequate attention to new evidence presented" at the appeal which cast on the trial judges' conclusion that the bomb that destroyed Pan Am flight 103 began its journey in Malta" (if it was possible for its journey to have begun somewhere else, Megrahi should not have been found guilty);
- the appeal judges did not take "logical reasoning and common sense into consideration" and recognise "that a reasonable jury could never have come to the conclusion of 'guilt' in regard to the appellant [Megrahi] on the basis of the vague and ambivalent evidence ... Furthermore it can be reasonably that a determination of 'guilty' under such circumstances does in no way meet the basic requirement under Scottish law that proof be established beyond a reasonable doubt"; and
- the defence lawyers "chose not to make use of many of the means available to it to defend the appellant and thus deprived him of his right to adequate and authentic legal representation under European standards", Megrahi was not able to choose his own defence lawyers and the defence team did always follow their client's instructions; all this suggests "the defence strategy may not have been genuine and authentic".
Koechler stated that as the evidence from the trial was again presented to the appeal judges, "it became entirely clear to any rational observer" that the evidence with which the prosecution claimed proved that Megrahi was the purchaser of clothes found to have been packed in the bomb-laden suitcase "had been interpreted arbitrarily by the trial judges" and in fact indicated that Megrahi could not have been the purchaser.
"Because in this entirely circumstantial case, in the absence of any material evidence, everything finally depends on whether the appellant bought the clothes or not, the entire verdict collapses if this fact cannot be proven 'beyond a reasonable doubt'", Koechler noted.
Koechler criticised the presence, in both the original trial and the appeal proceedings, of two unlisted representatives of the US Department of Justice seated with the prosecution lawyers.
[Professor Koechler's full report on the appeal proceedings, as well as his report on the original trial, can be found at <http://www.i-p-o.org/lockerbie_observer_mission.htm>.]
From Green Left Weekly, May 8, 2002.
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