From Mr R. Barker

I fear that Charles Flores and others who have been voting elsewhere on whether they “agree with putting Saddam Hussein to death” have somehow missed the point (TMIS, 12 November).

Until the verdict – or, more accurately, until sentence was pronounced – everybody had appeared to be in agreement that the former dictator should be tried before Iraqi judges in an Iraqi court under Iraqi law. The alternative would have been to have him appear before an “international” court, even though the charges on which he was being tried were not international, but Iraqi-national. Saddam would have preferred that option obviously, not least because the death penalty would have been out of the question. That’s why he didn’t “recognise” the court. But that didn’t matter: what mattered was that the court recognised him.

The simple fact is that his nation still has the death penalty. That is their law, and in a world where some people can still be stoned to death for adultery, or have their limbs hacked off for stealing, it is nothing to do with anybody else. People outside Iraq can “protest” until they are blue in the face, but they have no say and no right to interfere with the laws of the land.

Charles Flores (after the sentencing) described the trial as “the kangaroo court appointed by American instigators, who of course have no qualms about supporting and abetting capital punishment. Back home they are known to have sent juveniles in wheelchairs and handicapped teenagers to the electric chair”.

Ah, good. Blame the Americans for it. That’s always the easy option.

(And it’s a bit rich, not to say meaningless, when it’s coming from a nation that lets rapists off with a caution.)

But the US has the impossible job of trying to restore “law and order” to Iraq. That is Iraq’s law and order, not America’s, or Britain’s... or Malta’s.

If Britain had a bigger say in things, it may (remotely) have considered abolishing the death penalty, even before the trial started, but that would not have been what the Iraqis were seeking in wishing to see Saddam face justice, as they saw it.

Of course, if Malta were in charge of the courts system, Saddam would have been out on bail since his arrest and looking at being tried in maybe 12 years’ time, then facing a period on probation with a stern warning that he should try harder to behave himself in future.

Revel Barker

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