Saddam Hussein’s legal representatives today made an appeal to justice ministers in Sweden to consider staging the former dictator’s trial for crimes against humanity.

The head of Iraq’s war-crimes tribunal said today that the United States had pledged to hand over Saddam Hussein and about 100 other suspects to Iraqi authorities before July 1, when Iraq assumes sovereignty from its US-led occupiers.

Saddam Hussein’s lawyers are concerned about their client’s welfare after seeing the way some prisoners were being treated by their US military guards at the Abu Ghraib prison, one of the lawyers said in Amman, Jordan.