Irfan unfortunately aggravates his offence by labelling Karadzic as a “war criminal ” before even this tribunal has heard any evidence. As a criminal defence lawyer I reject such an approach.

Of, course, Irfan may have been talking as a realist accepting the inevitability that this court will find Karadzic guilty unless it psychologically harrasses him to death as it did to Milosevic.

By the way Irafn -mate you really need to stay at different hotels if you truly think the depressing lttle(15 sq m) cell Kaadzic is in is anything like a 5 star hotel.

Greg Adler

I submit myself to the law of the land I live in because I made that choice. That’s different for invasion. And its also different for genocide.

The Hague is an extension of a hegemony of ‘universal’ human rights. I tend to agree with them, so I can stomach that okay.

The military trial at Guantanamo is an extension of a claim that the US’s values are universally applicable. I can’t stomach that. (Even though I’m no fan of the Taliban - but go see ‘Charlie’s War’ for an entertaining hint at a backstory).

There’s a lot of criticism about the procedural fairness of these various trials. But where is the decrying of blindingly obvious elephant in the room - the basic rationale of these systems of justice?

Guantanamo is a travesty of principle. It represents a dangerous arrogance: dangerous in what it says about the responsible nation; dangerous in the weakness and acquiescence of the rest of the world in (failure in) opposing it, and; dangerous in the confusion it generates, that undermines more worthy systems (imperfect though they may be) like the International Court.

Sure, sure, we’re all worldly cynics, we know this - but we have already lost if we don’t continue to say it. Look at Ghandi - he made great progress by stating the bleeding, unjust, obvious.