IRAQ URGED TO REPRIEVE SADDAM AIDES

Louise Arbour, the United Nations high commissioner for human rights, appealed to Iraq not to execute two senior aides to Saddam Hussein.
Barzan al-Tikriti, Saddam's half-brother and former intelligence chief, and Awad al-Bander, a former chief judge, have been sentenced to death for the killings of 148 Shia villagers in Dujail in the 1980s. Arbour said that she had sent her latest appeal directly to Jalal Talabani, the Iraqi president.  
An earlier appeal from the UN official not to carry out a death sentence on Saddam himself was ignored by the authorities in Baghdad.
Arbour said: "International law, as it currently stands, only allows the imposition of the death penalty as an exceptional measure within rigorous legal constraints."
She said concerns that she expressed about the fairness and impartiality of Saddam's trial applied equally to the other two men, whose appeals against their sentences - like that of Saddam - had been rejected.