Thegoodbadtruth's Blog

The last thing the anti-Iraq lobby needs is help from Giovanni di Stefano December 13, 2009

Tony Blair (Pic - World Economic Forum at Flick'r)

Tony Blair is the object of a lawsuit which has just been filed for alleged breaches of the Geneva Conventions in connection with the war in Iraq.

The timing of this news comes just a day after Blair said that he would have gone to war in Iraq even if he had known there were not any weapons of mass destruction.

Charges being sought are centred around Blair’s alleged breaches of the 1957 Geneva Convention in committing British troops to a war that is accused of being unjustified by military necessity and thus illegal.

That sounds like good news for those wanting to put Blair – and Bush and Cheney and others – in front of a judge for their supposed criminal roles in the war.

But it isn’t.

Giovanni de Stefano is the Italian lawyer who is bringing the charges. He is also a man with a criminal past who spent several years in prison for fraud. He has been thrown out of several countries as being an undesirable, although he has regained limited visa access to the USA after being deported in 1992.

De Stefano is also known the man who unsuccessfully defended the following individuals, arguably the best known of a long list: The Serbian paramilitary leader and warlord Zeljko Raznatovic, alias Arkan, who was a friend and business partner of de Stefano before being indicted by the UN for multiple crimes against humanity; His boss, Serbian war criminal and President Slobodan Milosevic, another personal friend of de Stefano’s; Ali Hassan al-majid, alias Chemical Ali, the man responsible for the gassing of thousands of Kurds in Iraq; Tariq Aziz, Saddam Hussain’s right-hand man for many years; Gary Glitter, a British ex-pop singer-turned-convicted-pedophile.

And there are many others.

This is not the kind of lawyer that the anti-Iraq War lobby needs. On the contrary, he is a liability to their cause.

Distrusted in many legal circles, known for his love of the limelight, forbidden from exercising business activites in several countries and a friend of some of the worst war criminals to have been convicted since the Second World War, Giovanni de Stefano has reached new heights of hypocrisy in the legal world by now attempting to take Tony Blair to court.

The anti-Iraq War community had better start praying that he does not succeed in getting his filed charges to court. Because if he does, that would mean almost certain defeat and a resounding setback for all those who would like to see Blair before a judge.

Much more importantly, any jurisprudence reached in an eventual unsuccessful trial could well mean that getting Blair back to court later would be almost impossible.

Surely there must be some more credible and competent lawyers out there somewhere.

As we say in good old English: “I wouldn’t touch Giovanni de Stefano with a barge-pole.”