Only once, in a lifetime of making speeches, have I become so overcome with emotion that I choked up. It happened at a ceremony last year to mark the 20th anniversary of the Srebrenica slaughter, when more than 8,000 men and boys were shot by Bosnian Serb militiamen after the fall of the town in 1995. (You can watch my thoroughly un-British lapse here.)
My excuse is that I had just been listening to one of the mothers reciting, without histrionics or self-pity, the story of her son’s murder. Two years previously, I had visited Srebrenica, met the survivors, heard the harrowing stories of boys being marked for death because they were tall for their age.
We tend to think of these massacres as belonging to a different age: an age of black-and-white newsreel and uncomfortable-looking clothes. Srebrenica has the power to touch us because of its immediacy. The victims were shaped by the same influences as us. They watched the same TV, listened to the same music, followed the same sports. So did the perpetrators.
In the circumstances, you might expect me to be delighted that Radovan Karadzic, the Bosnian Serb commander responsible for the atrocity, has been sentenced to 40 years in prison for war crimes. But, though Karadzic may have got what he deserved morally, it is less clear that he got what he deserved legally.
The growth of international jurisdiction since the early 1990s has been extraordinary. Until very recently, the world operated on the basis of a clearly understood rule, namely that crimes were the responsibility of the state on whose territory they were committed. International jurisdiction was limited to the tiny number of areas that were, by their nature, extra-territorial, such as piracy on the high seas and the treatment of ambassadors.
Not any more. A series of international tribunals, like the one that sentenced Karadzic, have extended their writ to inside the borders of sovereign states. And, superficially, you can see the attraction: If a monster like Radovan Karadzic won’t get justice in his own country, runs the argument, then surely he should get it somewhere.
But who gets to decide what constitutes justice? The principle of territorial jurisdiction, which has pertained since the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, ensures some link between laws and law-makers. Once international panels decide that they have their own mandate, superior to national laws, that link is severed. What if Iranian judges had Westerners kidnapped and put on trial for adultery or usury, on grounds that these offenses went unpunished in their own countries? They might justify such an action with very similar logic to the International Criminal Tribunal on Yugoslavia (ICTY).
At least an Iranian court would be quick and cheap. The same is not true of ICTY, which took more than five years to try Karadzic — before his appeal process begins. And even five years is indecently hasty by comparison to the same court’s trial of the former Serbian president, Slobodan Milosevic.
With no meaningful scrutiny, international lawyers are free to suit themselves, meandering their way through gargantuan budgets, changing their own rules when they become inconvenient. As John Laughland showed in his study of the Milosevic trial, the ICTY admitted hearsay evidence, repeatedly amended its rules of procedure and, when the old brute proved surprisingly eloquent in his own defense, took the extraordinary step of imposing counsel on him. Eight years and $200 million later, with the court no closer to a verdict, both judge and defendant were dead.
It’s striking that these international indictments always seem to come from the same political direction: A writ was served against Ariel Sharon, but not against Yasser Arafat. Augusto Pinochet was arrested, but Fidel Castro could attend international summits. Donald Rumsfeld was indicted in Europe, but not Saddam Hussein.
Which brings us back to the main objection. While tyrants ignore international rulings, democracies — or, more precisely, judges within democracies — don’t. Courts in Western countries increasingly use international conventions to challenge the decisions of their elected governments.
When Karadzic was whisked off to the Hague, the then-British foreign secretary declared that it demonstrated Serbia’s fitness as a democracy. In fact, it did the opposite. Had he been tried in Serbia or extradited for trial in Bosnia, with a reasonable expectation of due process, that would have demonstrated Serbia’s fitness.
None of these things becomes less true simply because we don’t like Karadzic. Bad men still deserve justice. Indeed, bad men particularly deserve justice.
Dan Hannan is a British Conservative MEP.
