Pragmatic And Clearly Understood

It is amazing (although, after all these years, it no longer is to me) who turns up at the better dinner tables around God's Own University, and of course, as is their business, they know who one is. One of them told me this week that Serbia had certainly known all along where Ratko Mladić was, rather implying that therefore so had he and his. Meanwhile, Daniel Hannan writes:

Serbia’s readiness to extradite Ratko Mladić to The Hague, we keep being told, is proof of that country’s democratic fitness, and will hasten its admission to the EU. As Nicolas Sarkozy puts it, “it is a step toward integration of Serbia into the European Union”.

In fact, if you think about it, the opposite ought to be true. Serbia would have proved its fitness when a man like Mladić could expect justice in Belgrade. The sad truth is that he is unlikely to get justice from the ICTY.

Why do I say that? Well, look at its most high-profile case so far: the trial of Slobodan Milošević. As the great Theodore Dalrymple put it: “The International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in The Hague was little more than a kangaroo court, though without the very real advantages of that kind of legal establishment, namely speed and economy.” Yup. It masticated its leisurely way through a $200 million a year budget, while Slobbo whiled away five years in prison, and had still not reached a verdict when both judge and defendant were dead.

Along the way, as John Laughland showed in his magisterial study of the trial, the ICTY had violated almost every legal precept, admitting hearsay evidence, contradicting itself, changing its rules of procedure 22 times and, when the old monster proved surprisingly eloquent in his own defence, taking the extraordinary step of imposing counsel on him.

For more than three centuries, the world has operated on the pragmatic and clearly understood principle that crimes are the responsibility of the state on whose territory they are committed – in this case, Bosnia-Herzegovina. Now, without debate, and with little thought, we are rushing into a universal jurisdiction policed by a caste of fervent human rights activists who have never taken the trouble to get a democratic mandate for their agenda.

But Mladić was an utter swine, you say. Well, maybe. Then again, bad men – perhaps bad men especially – deserve justice. When they fail to get it, it is the rest of us who are diminished.