Has the Hague tribunal encouraged more war crimes trials?
The slow grind of the Hague tribunal has raised a host of new questions about international justice, not only in the Balkans. The dreadful genocidal bloodbaths in Rwanda and Burundi, where the United Nations seemed powerless and unwilling to intervene, outraged liberal opinion in the west, and obliged the UN to establish a Rwandan war crimes tribunal. More recently, the UN itself has suggested that a similar tribunal be set up to deal with the atrocities committed in East Timor last year by anti-independence paramilitaries and their Indonesian military puppet masters. What do human rights groups say? International jurists and human rights groups have long advocated a uniform global system of dealing with war crimes and other systematic abuses of humanity. In the summer of 1998, in Rome, 120 countries put their names to a historic resolution calling for an international criminal court. Only seven nations voted against, but serious doubts remain about whether such a court could function
