Late last week, the Office of Public Counsel for the Defence (OPCD), which has been representing Saif al-Islam Gaddafi at the ICC, filed its official response to Libya’s admissibility challenge at the ICC. The impressive report, a whopping 92-pages long, should be read in its entirety. It includes an in-depth account of the arrest and detention of Melinda Taylor and the ICC4. Kevin Jon Heller at Opinio Juris has covered the most controversial and pertinent bits of the report (see here and here) and has posted a must-read piece on the relevance of the failure to provide Saif with due process in Libya’s admissibility challenge. Here are a few things that I found particularly interesting and important.
TRIPOLI – “We certainly did not expect the results, but…our future is certainly better than our present and our past,” said Sami al-Saadi, the former ideologue of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group and the founder of the political party al-Umma al-Wasat, which finished third in Central Tripoli during Libya’s recent parliamentary election. The man whom Taliban leader Mullah Omar once called the “Sheikh of the Arabs,” and who authored the LIFG’s anti-democracy manifesto The Choice is Theirs, accepted the apparent victory of Libya’s more liberal forces.