Seven years after its establishment the Special Tribunal for Lebanon (STL) in the Hague finally began the trial of four men accused of murdering the former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri in 2005. None of the four suspects, all Hezbollah members, have been caught and instead all are being tried by the UN-backed court in absentia. Criticism of the UN's handling of Hariri's murder abounds.
"Hariri was the victim of a vast conspiracy, as UN investigators concluded early on, but today only five suspects, involved at the operational level, have been indicted [the fifth suspect was indicted in October 2013 but is not on trial at this stage]...
More troubling is the fact that the prosecution has not outlined a motive for the assassination...And yet that was not always true. In his opening report, the first commissioner of the UN investigation, the German Detlev Mehlis, provided a motive: that Hariri was killed for political reasons, as it was well-known in Lebanon that he was likely to challenge and defeat Syria's candidates in the summer 2005 elections...[H]e concluded that there was Syrian and Lebanese intelligence involvement in the crime...
To the UN, Mr Mehlis was a headache. When he began his assignment, he later told me in an interview, UN secretary general Kofi Annan had made it clear 'that he did not want another trouble spot'...
Far more palatable to the UN was Mr Mehlis's successor, the Belgian Serge Brammertz. Perhaps that's because Mr Brammertz progressed very little in his investigation...[T]he UN did not seem to want it otherwise. His successor would take three more years to issue an indictment, showing how empty was the Belgian's dossier. Meanwhile, many more people were assassinated in Lebanon..."