UN rights chief to Iraq:

Stop executions

SWITZERLAND: United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Louise Arbour appealed to Iraq not to execute two ex-officials from the administration of former president Saddam Hussein.

An earlier appeal from Arbour not to carry out a death sentence on Saddam himself, executed last Saturday, was brushed aside by the authorities in Baghdad.

Arbour said she had sent her latest appeal - referring to Saddam's half-brother and former intelligence chief Barzan al-Tikriti and a former chief judge, Awad al-Bander - directly to Iraqi President Jalal Talabani.

"International law, as it currently stands, only allows the imposition of the death penalty as an exceptional measure within rigorous legal constraints," said the former Canadian High Court justice.

She said concerns that she expressed about the fairness and impartiality of Saddam's trial applied equally to the other two men, whose appeals against sentence - like that of Saddam - have been rejected.

"I have therefore today directly appealed to the President of the Republic of Iraq to refrain from carrying out these sentences," Arbour declared.

Under Iraq's international obligations, she said, the Baghdad government was bound to give the two men the opportunity to seek commutation of the sentence or pardon.

At the United Nations in New York, a spokeswoman for U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said the U.N. leader was "strongly behind" and "fully endorses" Arbour's statement.

Ban on Tuesday created a flap by saying that capital punishment was up to individual nations, despite many senior U.N. officials having opposed it as the European Union does.

But his spokeswoman Michele Montas said on Wednesday that Ban believed in the need to work to abolish the death penalty, although he was aware that nations differed on the issue.

Montas added: "The Secretary-General strongly believes in the wisdom of Article 3 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights which states everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person.

"In that context, he fully endorses the call made today by (UN High Commissioner for Human Rights) Louise Arbour for restraint by the government of Iraq in the execution of the death sentences imposed by the Iraqi high tribunal."

An Iraqi government official said earlier that Saddam's half-brother and former head of intelligence, Barzan Ibrahim al-Tikriti, and Awad Ahmed al-Bandar, the former chief judge of the revolutionary court, will be hanged at dawn on Thursday. Meanwhile, the fallout from Saddam's execution in which Shiite hangmen taunted the former dictator as he stood on the gallows continued to reverberate.

Iraqi authorities on Wednesday arrested a guard present during Saddam's execution as part of an inquiry into how an unofficial video of the hanging was posted on the Internet, triggering widespread protests in Iraq's Sunni Arab community.

On Tuesday, Maliki launched an inquiry into the source of the video, apparently taken with a mobile phone.

Geneva, Thursday, AFP