CSM: Ratko Mladic's arrival at Hague bolsters promise of international courts

http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Europe/2011/0531/Ratko-Mladic-s-arrival-at-Hague-bolsters-promise-of-international-courts

Bosnian Serb Gen. Ratko Mladic was placed on a Hague-bound airplane Tuesday after losing his appeal not to be sent there on 11 counts of war crimes in Bosnia. His arrival the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), set up in 1993, further legitimizes global efforts to establish laws and courts to prosecute crimes that for most of human history took place with impunity and were usually resolved by wars, treaties, time, and forgetting.

Attempts at such forms of international justice have been fraught, imperfect, often highly political, expensive, and selective, many jurists will agree. But in the past two decades, the world has increasingly viewed referrals to The Hague of those accused of large-scale atrocities as the norm – a sea change in the way the world does business. Libya's Col. Muammar Qaddafi is under investigation by the International Criminal Court (ICC) and Sudan's President Omar Al Bashir has been indicted for war crimes in Darfur.

At The Hague, Mladic, who was in hiding for 16 years, will join his war-partner Radovan Karadzic at the same suburban jail where former Serb President Slobodan Milosevic died in 2005. Mr. Milosevic was the acknowledged mastermind of the Balkan wars in the 1990s.

“Justice is sometimes slower than you would like … there are a lot of holes and weaknesses in the system,” says Mr. Ellis. “But we are moving from impunity to accountability. Those that commit heinous crimes can no longer easily think they will get away with it. For those of us who watch this, it is really a remarkable development.”


Former Serbian military commander Ratko Mladic travels
in a white armored vehicle as he is transported in a police
convoy from a Belgrade courthouse and jail complex to
the airport May 31.

I mean, Mladic was armed! In a house! In a neighborhood! He's a bad, bad man, and everyone says so. Shooting him dead and dumping the body was the only way to deal with him.

Well, unless you subscribe to that whole "due process/fair trial" thingie. But that's just a quaint relic from a simpler time. Nowadays, justice is dispensed from the muzzle of a rifle.

"Shooting him dead and dumping the body was the only way to deal with him..."

I imagine since the Serbian conflict is long since over, additional options of jurisprudence were presented, and were deemed more efficient and effective.

And by all means, efficiency (for sure) and effectiveness (let's leave it to constitutional spoilsports to argue otherwise) are excellent reasons for shortcuts through the Constitution and our treaty obligations. After all, if you start following the law for people that everyone agrees are very, very bad, pretty soon you're just going to get bogged down in a lot of "evidence" and "testimony" and who needs that? Efficiency über alles.

that Eichmann had been caught. I was still pretty young, and couldn't fully appreciate it until much later.

That was fifty-one years ago, universal jurisdiction hadn't been established, and there was no international court to take on all the hard cases. Israeli agents had to spirit him away before the Argentinians found out. It was only fifteen years before that when we established that there was no sovereign right to genocide.

Time to celebrate a bit, to go back just 150 years before date and reread "The Rights of Kings". This was the most radical idea at the end of the 18th century:

"I wish the fault may not lie the other way : I wish they may not be too easy. It was the seventeenth century before they
gave up divine right ; before they could be persuaded that one man is not entitled to make millions miserable.

But that delusion is now past — our worst errors are now over. And as the first step to virtue is to leave vice, so the first
sign of wisdom is to desert folly- — But I hope we shall not stop here — I hope we shall improve daily — I hope the time
will come, when reason shall see, and sentiment shall feel, and unanimity shall proclaim, that the public good is the end
of society, public happiness the bond of government!"

Indeed, improve daily. I just hope it's fast enough.