Saddam’s defender

last updated 8 January 2015

Paris

French lawyer Jacques Verges said this week that he would add Saddam Hussein to the list of famous despots he has defended. Verges, 79, has a long history of hobnobbing with people accused of terrorism or genocide. As a student at the Sorbonne, he became close friends with Pol Pot, who later went on to slaughter more than a million people in Cambodia. In the 1960s, Verges married an Algerian terrorist and began defending extremists on the left and right, including Venezuelan leftist Carlos the Jackal and Gestapo chief Klaus Barbie. No date or venue has been set for Saddam’s trial, and charges have not yet been filed, but Verges has already begun to craft a defense. “If there has been a crime against humanity, if there has been a genocide” in Iraq, he said, “it is the fault of the Americans and the British.”