On November 5, 2006, the Iraqi High Tribunal sentenced Saddam Hussein to death by hanging for the killing and deportation of 148 people in the town of Dujail after an attempt on his life there in 1982, and two of his senior aides were sentenced with him. The verdict came after a trial that lasted more than a year. The hearing was brief. He was executed on December 30, 2006, at the start of a holiday, and the speed of the execution was criticised by several governments that had opposed the death penalty.
The court had been set up by the Iraqi authorities that took power after the invasion of 2003 and was given a base in law that allowed it to try crimes against humanity and war crimes, and its judges were Iraqi, and its rules and part of its funding came from abroad. The trial opened in 2005. It was troubled from the start, for two defence lawyers were killed and a third fled the country, and the first chief judge resigned after saying that he could not be fair to a former president.
The Dujail case was chosen as the first of the charges to be tried because it was narrow and the documents were strong, and other cases were still being prepared when the execution took place, among them the killing of Kurdish civilians in the late 1980s and the violent putting down of the rising of 1991. The order of the cases was argued about at the time. The execution closed the file.
The trial was judged by observers in two ways. Its supporters said that an Arab court had held a former head of state to account for crimes against his own people, which had not happened in the region before. That was rare. Its critics said that the process had been rushed and that its flaws and the timing of the execution made it look like the work of the occupation, and the argument has not been settled.