The primacy of politics has damaged the pursuit of justice at the War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague, argues Chris Stephen
Sixty years ago this week the Nuremberg war crimes trials opened to great fanfare and a promise that in prosecuting Hitler's minions, a new era of international justice had dawned. Yet the anniversary arrives with its successor, the UN's court for former Yugoslavia in The Hague, mired in trouble.
Sefer Halilovic, the most senior Bosnian Muslim general to be tried before this court, has just been found not guilty of all charges, raising the question of why prosecutors decided to press ahead with his complex - and expensive - trial in the first place.
Meanwhile as of last week, Slobodan Milosevic, the court's most high-profile defendant, was once again sick, causing the 22nd delay in a trial that is nearly four years old and far from over.
November also brings with it another anniversary: it is now 10 years since Bosnian Serb warlords Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic were indicted for genocide, yet the international community has failed to bring them to trial.
Add in a cash shortage as donor nations delay payments, and an unrealistic closing date of 2008, and the Hague Tribunal has a crisis on its hands.
It was not supposed to be this way. In 1993 the UN created this court to revive the Nuremberg process, and once again world leaders promised the start of a new age of accountability.
Early on the court scored notable successes. Just as an earlier generation had heard testimony from the men who shoved bodies into the gas chambers at Auschwitz, so The Hague exposed the full horrors of the Bosnian war.
Muslim women went under the bright courtroom lights to recall savage ordeals of gang rape, while survivors of Bosnian Serb detention camps told of daily beatings and starvation so acute their clothes fell from their bodies. One guilt-stricken soldier came forward to testify how he was forced to machine-gun hundreds of Muslim prisoners at Srebrenica until his trigger finger hurt.
Prosecutors were able to lay out, in great detail, the whole complex machinery of "ethnic cleansing" in which Serb and Croat units rampaged through Bosnia.
These trials spurred new courts for Rwanda, Sierra Leone and East Timor. They later became the template for the new International Criminal Court, also in The Hague, which is now investigating Sudanese atrocities in Darfur.
Then came the problems, and these stem from the same root: politics.
Politics appears to have dictated that, in the interests of impartiality, Muslim generals face justice alongside their Croat and Serb enemies. This is despite the fact that Bosnia's Muslims did not commit widescale acts of ethnic cleansing.
Instead, prosecutors have indicted Halilovic and other commanders for more localised atrocities, in this case the slaying of several dozen Croats in two villages in southern Bosnia in 1993.
For Halilovic, the judges made the rather obvious point that, since he had stepped down as army commander in June 1993, he could hardly be blamed for the massacres which took place in September.
Politics also plays its part in the Milosevic trial. If one tenth of the allegations against the former Yugoslav president are proved, he will spend the rest of his life in jail. Yet prosecutors have charged him with crimes in three separate wars - Bosnia, Croatia and Kosovo. This has a noble purpose - the exposure of the full evil of his alleged crimes - but the result has been a whale of a trial. Milosevic has decided, entirely legally, to defend himself and his health is now suffering from the crushing load. A narrower trial would have been over by now.
Politics is also behind the failure to catch Karadzic, the former Bosnian Serb president, and his military chief Mladic, both charged with the murder of 7,000 Muslims at Srebrenica in 1995. The blame is not with The Hague - chief prosecutor Carla del Ponte has railed against their freedom for years - but with the international community.
Karadzic is reportedly hiding in the woods of southern Bosnia, while Mladic is believed ensconced, in comfort, at the home of army buddies in neighbouring Serbia. Half-hearted commando raids to catch the former and half-hearted diplomatic pressure to push the Serbs to arrest the latter have failed. And in this failure, the international community has shown a dangerous lack of will.
Meanwhile, the Hague Tribunal is wrestling with the problem of how to complete a huge caseload, stretching to more than 70 trials, in time for a 2008 closure deadline. Looming over all of this is a much greater political battle, for the very future of international justice.
The United States, which took the lead in organising both the Nuremberg and Hague war crimes courts, has now done a U-turn. Washington says international courts lack democratic accountability, and wants them closed. It has taken aim at the International Criminal Court, demanding immunity for US citizens. Opponents say America simply fears that international courts could one day indict a US president.
With America opposed, and the EU as the main supporter of the International Criminal Court, the UN has been left divided.
Yet despite the problems, The Hague has much to be proud of. More than 50 criminals are behind bars, including most of the key operators of "ethnic cleansing". A string of legal firsts has been established along the way, not the least that rape, long regarded as an "optional extra" by soldiers down the centuries, is now a war crime.
Most importantly, perhaps, these trials have exposed how, behind the mask, warlords are often thugs and criminals who wrap themselves in the cloak of patriotism to grow rich and powerful.
And while The Hague may struggle, war crimes justice has taken off around the world. Chile is putting its former dictator Augusto Pinochet on trial, Belgium and Holland are staging trials of war criminals from Africa, and the International Criminal Court has announced its first cases, against the murderous Lord's Resistance Army in Uganda.
All this began with Nuremberg, and the idea that justice should apply to everyone, even world leaders. The Hague has shown that this idea can be made to work. Whether it will continue to work depends on much stronger action by the international community, whose leaders must be uneasily aware that the war crimes justice they are being asked to support might one day be turned on them.
Chris Stephen is the author of Judgement Day: The Trial of Slobodan Milosevic, published by Atlantic Books