Human Rights and International Law. posted by Richard Seymour

I know the Spectator is a dubious source in many ways, but there is an interesting article on the likely collapse of the Milosevic trial in the most recent edition. As offensive as I find the implication that Milosevic might be innocent, I think the impotence of the court in this instance might reveal the limits of public trials of ex-statesmen. First of all, they have all the advantages. They know the detail of what they have done and how well they have hidden it. They have been careful to delegate this, and disavow that.

I am not saying that such trials should not occur. But perhaps part of the problem is the hypocrisy of those organising the trials. It reminds me of the way in which certain obvious war crimes were ruled legal at Nuremberg because the Allies were guilty of them too. How can one try Milosevic for, say, knowingly slaughtering civilians when Nato did the same by bombing a television centre they knew to be manned and by shifting to civilian targets after three weeks? There is a clear lesson here - monsters should be tried by their victims, not by imperial interlopers. Unlike the attempted Pinochet trial, this initiative emerged as the result of a Western desire to validate their aggression in the Balkans, not as the result of a grass-roots campaign to bring a murdering bastard to justice. Similarly, Iraqis should run the trial of Saddam. They should flog him and flay him if they so desire. It should not be left to some spurious confection of "international law" (with the US urging on court proceedings, the sovereignty of which it does not even accept).