Lockerbie Trial - 9780379215120

This book traces the history of the Lockerbie incident from the evening it occurred on 21 December 1988 through the trial and subsequent appeal to the discontinuance of Libya's conflict against the United States and the United Kingdom in the International Court on September 10, 2003. It provides the core legal texts relevant to the trial and appeal - and to the associated International Court conflict. An introductory chapter analyzes the sequence of events establishing that international terrorists are best dealt with in national courts, and not in the international courts and tribunals. States should be prepared to think outside the box when exercising national jurisdiction, as the U.K. did in arranging a trial in another country and with judges replacing a jury as the fact finders.

Documents in this work include: the petition for arrest, the indictment, the demands of the U.K. and U.S. for the surrender of the two Libyan suspects for trial, the Libyan response to these demands, the various Security Council resolutions endorsing these demands, the trial and the appeal judgments and the order on provisional measures and the judgment on preliminary objections of the International Court of Justice.

The documents are collected into four parts:



· Part 1: The Investigation and the Identification of the Accused - contains documents from the date of the tragedy to the time of the Scottish warrants to arrest the two Libyans and the U.S. indictment in November 1991


· Part 2: Getting the Accused to Trial - has documents from the end of 1991 to (and slightly beyond) the surrender of the two Libyans for trial in April 1999, generally concerning the moves within the United Nations to have the two Libyan suspects surrendered for trial. This part also contains reports of two Scottish cases involving allegations of contempt of court and attempts by the BBC to televise the trial


· Part 3: The Trial and the Appeal - contains the trial verdict and the reasons for it, the grounds of appeal and the appeal judgment, plus critiques of the verdict and the appeal decision. It covers the period from late 1999 to September 2003 when Libya was acknowledged as having met the demands originally made in 1991-92


· Part 4: Meanwhile at the International Court - contains documents (from March 1992 to September 2003) relating to the conflict raised by Libya against the U.S. and U.K. relating to the Lockerbie incident.