Lawyers for Saddam and six co-defendants are expected to present their witness list during the 23rd hearing of a trial that began on August 21 and was temporarily adjourned on November 8.

The seven men are accused of responsibility for the deaths of 182,000 Kurds during the so-called Anfal campaign, when government troops swept through Iraqi Kurdistan in 1988, burning and bombing thousands of villages.

Saddam and his former aides argue that it was a legitimate counter-insurgency operation against Kurdish separatists at a time when the country was at war with its neighbour Iran.

The accused -- including Saddam's cousin Ali Hassan al-Majid, known as "Chemical Ali" -- all face the death penalty if convicted. Saddam and Majid are the only defendants facing a charge of genocide, however.

A US official close to the court said the resumption of the trial will see more Kurdish witnesses testifying, and they will be followed by expert witnesses.

Dozens of Kurdish villagers and former guerrillas have already testified, giving horrifying accounts of atrocities allegedly committed by Iraqi forces against men, women and children during the Anfal campaign.

The witnesses described the detention of civilians, the rape of women prisoners and villages being bombed with chemical weapons.

Defence lawyers have boycotted the trial but are still expected to present their list of witnesses after chief judge Mohammed al-Oraibi al-Khalifah ordered them to do so in the previous session.

On November 30 the New York-based Human Rights Watch, which is tracking Saddam's trials, described as fundamentally flawed the deposed dictator's previous trial in which he was sentenced to death.

In that trial, the former president and seven others were accused of killing 148 Shiites from the village of Dujail in the 1980s after Saddam escaped an assassination bid there in 1982.

"The trial... was marred by so many procedural and substantive flaws that the verdict is unsound," it said in a statement released along with the 97-page report.

"The proceedings in the Dujail trial were fundamentally unfair," said Nehal Bhuta, author of the report.

On November 5 the chief judge in the first trial, Rauf Rashid Abdel Rahman, sentenced Saddam and two others to death by hanging.

"The tribunal squandered an important opportunity to deliver credible justice to the people of Iraq. And its imposition of the death penalty after an unfair trial is indefensible," Bhuta said in his report.

The HRW report was based on observations during the trial and on dozens of interviews with judges, prosecutors and defence lawyers.

But Iraqi officials dismissed the rights watchdog's report as a "Western way of thinking".

"An Iraqi court found him guilty and for us it was a day of festivity when the judge delivered the death verdict on Saddam," a top official close to the trial told AFP.

The Dujail verdicts are now with an appellate chamber, whose final word will come within an unspecified time. If it upholds the trial court's ruling, Iraqi law stipulates that Saddam must be executed within 30 days of that decision.

Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki has already said Saddam may be hanged before the end of this year.