Special Tribunal For Lebanon

The Special Tribunal for Lebanon (STL) is an international criminal tribunal for the prosecution, under international law, of criminal acts of those responsible for the assassination of Rafic Hariri on 14 February 2005. Therefore, the tribunal is also called "Hariri Tribunal". The court is based in Leidschendam, near The Hague, Netherlands and it has a field office in the Lebanese capital, Beirut.

The tribunal officially opened on 1 March 2009. There was an initial three-year mandate for the court and there is no fixed timeline for the judicial work to be completed, so the tribunal may be operational for several years. In January 2011, the Lebanese government collapsed when 11 cabinet ministers aligned with the March 8 alliance resigned following Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri's refusal to reject the STL. Six months later a new government was formed composed of March 8 members and the former March 14's Progressive Socialist Party under Prime Minister Najib Mikati.

In March 2011, Antonio Cassese, the president of the STL, issued his second annual report on the operation and activities of the tribunal in which he anticipated the completion of the bulk of the court’s work by 2015. “The end of investigations with a view to submitting indictments by 29 February 2012 would allow us to begin with maximum alacrity, already in this third year, at least pre-trial and some trial proceedings, thus being able to complete the core mandate of the Tribunal within a total of six years”, said Judge Cassese. The prosecutor submitted an indictment on 17 January 2011 and filed an amendment to the indictment on 12 March. After a review by the pre-trial judge Daniel Fransen, the tribunal submitted four confidential arrest warrants to the authorities of Lebanon on 30 June 2011. According to secondary sources, the warrants name four senior members of Hezbollah. The party's leader Hassan Nasrallah denounced the legitimacy of the tribunal three days later on 3 July.

Before the Special Tribunal for Lebanon was established the UNIIIC was in charge of investigating the assassination of Rafic Hariri. The UNIIIC’s role was to gather evidence and to assist the Lebanese authorities to conduct their investigations. The STL and UNIIIC are completely separate organisations.

The United Nations investigation initially implicated high-level Lebanese and Syrian security officers in Hariri's killing. Damascus denied involvement. Four pro-Syrian Lebanese generals were detained by the Lebanese authorities for four years without charge in connection with Hariri's killing. One of the first acts of the Special Tribunal for Lebanon was to order the release of the generals after an STL judge ruled that there was not enough evidence to justify their detention.