WASHINGTON, Nov 24: A leading international jurist on Friday criticized U.S. plans to try foreign terrorism suspects before military courts, saying there was no guarantee the accused would get fair trials.

Richard Goldstone, a South African judge who was chief prosecutor for the U.N. war crimes tribunal, said the plan announced by President George W. Bush earlier this month amounted to “second- or third-class” justice.

“I think it would be bad for the United States to deprecate its own court system, its own insistence over decades and centuries on fair and due process,” Goldstone said on CNN’s “Larry King Live.”

“Perhaps more importantly, it would lack any credibility in the international community. There would always be doubt as to whether the guilt of (Osama) bin Laden or any of the other people tried in secret has been established.”

Asked why Americans should care what the rest of the world thinks, Goldstone said the issue was whether suspects would get “the sort of trial that the United States constitution has always envisaged”.

“If not, this would be demeaning of the very values for which the United States stands,” he said.

Earlier this week, Bush defended the plan for military tribunals as “absolutely the right thing to do.”

“We’re fighting a war against the most evil kinds of people, and I need to have that extraordinary option at my fingertips,” he said.

The planned tribunals, which have drawn criticism from across the U.S. political spectrum, would be staffed by military officers who could convict suspects by a two-thirds majority decision.

Trials could be held in secret. The composition of the courts and their procedures would be determined by the U.S. defense secretary and military commanders.

Goldstone said the United States should not stoop to the level of the people it was trying to bring to justice.

“I don’t know about fair trials before a military tribunal. They will be held in secret. These (judges) are people who are part of a military hierarchy. They’re appointed by the president,” he said.

“One of the important points that certainly I find objectionable ... is that the defendants are not allowed to have counsel of their choice. The counsel have to be approved by (Defense) Secretary (Donald) Rumsfeld.”

Goldstone is currently chairman of the Independent International Commission on Kosovo, a body set up on the initiative of Swedish Prime Minister Goran Persson to analyze events before, during and after the Kosovo war.

He previously suggested that an international court convened by the U.N. Security Council should try anyone arrested for masterminding the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States.—Reuters