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The Final Judgement: Searching for International Justice
MUSIC:
BUSH: All the world now faces a test and the United Nations a difficult and defining moment.
BUSH: Will the United Nations serve the purpose of its founding or will it be irrelevant?
MUSIC dips under
ED: The Bush challenge a year ago made the United Nations reflect on everything it does. Over the past decade the UN has been midwife to a quiet revolution; the emerging idea of a justice system that transcends nations.
In this third programme in our series I'll be tracing the way international justice has become such a well-established part of the UN's bigger role of securing peace and security.
And the relationship between the United Nations and its most powerful member, the United States, is every bit as central to this story as it is to the questions of war and peace I have discussed over the past couple of weeks.
POSTCARD:
INSERT AUDIO: EVA
We are now in Republica Serbska and we have a group of mass graves. It is end of our second week of our exhumation and in the past week we opened a grave with 29 bodies in body bags and this week we already opened 3 graves and the 4th is open but today we will be pulling out bodies…
MUSIC PEAKS AND ENDS
FX: Car stopping / doors shutting
So we are standing on a grave to tell you the truth because this was the first grave here.
ED: This is the border between Bosnia and Serbia, a few miles from Srebrenica. The town has become a symbol for all the acts of genocide in the Balkans; at least seven and a half thousand Muslim men were rounded up and killed here in the summer of 1995. And Srebrenica's name haunts any debate about international intervention; this, the worst massacre on European soil in half a century, took place as a UN peacekeeping force watched and let it happen.
When a war crimes tribunal for the Balkans was first talked about no one really took it seriously; in the early 1990s European diplomats seemed unable to exert any influence at all over the tragedy unfolding in the former Yugoslavia.
Yet today 92 people have appeared before the Balkans war crimes tribunal in the Hague, other tribunals have been set up for war crimes in Rwanda and Sierra Leone, and a new, overarching international criminal court is being established - all of them under the UN umbrella. Judge Richard Goldstone was the first prosecutor for the ICTY, the International Criminal Tribunal for former Yugoslavia - he is also an academic lawyer with a strong sense of the history of this field, which begins with the Nuremberg Trials of the leaders of Nazi Germany in 1945.
INTERVIEW: JUDGE GOLDSTONE:
GOLDSTONE: Well the big debate was between Winston Churchill on the one hand who wanted to simply line up the Nazi war leaders and summarily execute them and there was lots of precedence for that. Stalin, obviously, would have gone along with that without any difficulty. The French were a bit ambivalent but it was the Americans, interestingly, who were insistent on having a fair trial and Churchill was convinced and that's how it all came about.
Was it a healthy thing to do, do you think?
GOLDSTONE: Oh absolutely. It set a standard although it was correctly viewed as victors justice. The judges acted independently and there were, of course, acquittals of fairly senior people and … but it set the whole pattern. Without Nuremberg we wouldn't have international criminal justice the way it is now.
And there was an attempt in 1948, I think, to establish some kind of permanent criminal court.
GOLDSTONE: Well it was assumed in 1948 and the beginning of the history of the United Nations that there would indeed be an international criminal court. But very soon the Cold War intervened and Russia and … in particular, would not have gone along with an international court and it sort of was shelved.
What changed with the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda?
GOLDSTONE: Well, this was the first ever international criminal court. Nuremberg was a multi-national - it wasn't international. Certainly, in my opinion, the great achievements of the Yugoslavia and the Rwanda tribunals are that they are established for the first time - and it was by no means a given or accepted - that established that an international tribunal could put on fair trials.
It's interesting, you said, that the court was … the courts were established under chapter 7 of the United Nations Charter which is really about peace and security not about justice - that was … was that sort of creative law making - making a link between the idea of justice and the idea of peace and security that was established at the time that the Yugoslavia and Rwanda courts were set up?
GOLDSTONE: It was indeed and for that reason it came as huge surprise to international humanitarian lawyers that a first ever international criminal court would come from the Security Council and not from a treaty. The evidence is pretty conclusive that justice does help reconciliation and it does help in stopping cycles of violence. If you look at the really violent or many of the violent areas around the world there's hasn't been justice. Never any justice. Never anybody brought to book. And revenge and hatred developing and really providing the fuel - the toxic fuel - for evil levers to use nationalism and that revenge and hatred to have another cycle of violence.
FX: Digging
ED: In a war, the casualties are numbers; a quarter of a million died during the conflict in Bosnia. In a justice system the victims are individuals; each death demands the meticulous standards we would expect of a murder investigation.
Eva Klanovski is a forensic anthropologist working for the International Commission for Missing Persons.
INSERT AUDIO: EXHUMATION POSTCARD
EVA: In this particular grave, grave number 5, we have remains of eight people…this is decomposing suppunification (?), it is the worst stage of decomposing of the bodies and of course, it attracts flies…
FX: SCRAPING
YANK MAN: Maureen, I think it does have teeth on this bucket.
YANK WOMAN: I've got some kind of indentation here.
MAN: Running what kind of direction?
WOMAN: This way.
Cross Fade
FX: BOSNIAN CHAT
EVA: They are measuring position of the bodies for crime technicians. They are taking photos off each body and measuring a position of each body in a grave. The crime technicians are taking documentation of the grave because it is a crime site. It will be serving as a documentation for an indictment.
FX: Digging - more US voices.
SLOW FADE OUT UNDER ED
ED: Eva is from Iceland, and working with her at this cemetery on a hill above the river Drina are forensic pathologists from Canada, the United States and the Netherlands as well as the local team from different parts of Bosnia. French troops stand guard alongside Bosnian Serb police in what is a truly international enterprise.
But like Nuremberg, this began as an American idea. Madeleine Albright - Bill Clinton's UN ambassador and later his Secretary of State - was one of those who fought hardest for it.
INTERVIEW: MADELEINE ALBRIGHT
Well the point here was that, especially when you're involved with something as grim as ethnic cleansing or genocide, that there is a tendency to blame an entire peoples or an entire nation for having had something happen, which is not really conducive to reconciliation after the horrors are over. And the purpose of the War Crimes Tribunal was basically to be able to assign individual guilt in order to expunge collective guilt. And that it would be possible for the perpetrators of the crimes to be identified and punished so that not everybody felt they were a part of it and reconciliation would be possible. That was the basic philosophy behind it.
When it was first talked about, well I won't say people laughed about it because it was a very serious subject, but a lot of people treated it with considerable scepticism and very few people at that stage believed that we'd see someone like Milosevic on trial. Were you confident that it could work?
Well I thought it was a great idea but you are absolutely right. I mean what happened was we voted it and then people said "you're never going to be able to find how the judges would be elected", you know, who were going to be the judges. So we managed to elect a slate of judges. Then the question was "you'd never get a prosecutor". And there were lots of arguments within the Security Council because Russia and the Muslim countries that were represented said that there could never be a member of Nato. Then the member of Nato didn't want to have a Muslim judge. I mean there were all kinds of non-starters on this. Then we did come, we came up with Richard Goldstone who was almost out of central casting. So we got the prosecutor. Then, actually there was the whole issue about where it would be and who would pay for it, how would it ever work? But we managed to set up a budget for we. We managed to get various countries, mainly the United States, to second people to work on it. So that all started. Then people said "there would never be any indictments". And there were indictments. And then people said "nobody would ever end up in the court" - and they did. Then they said nobody would ever be found guilty and go to jail. And all that has happened. So while there was scepticism I thought, and I obviously wasn't alone in this, I thought it was a really good idea. And I think it really is.
How important was it that it had a UN mandate, to avoid the accusation that it was victor's justice?
I think it was very important that it had a UN mandate. This kind of thing had not happened since the Nuremberg trials. I think the UN aspect of this is very very important.
FX: CAR
FADE UP - HOLD FOR 5' AND DIP UNDER ED
ED: The body parts dug up on the banks of the River Drina are transported to the Tuzla a couple of hours away. The morgue here currently holds the remains of over four thousand people - neatly stacked on shelves, although space is at such a premium that in many places each shelf carries two or three body bags. It's full to capacity now so around two and a half thousand other sets of remains are being stored in underground tunnels. Only once the specialists here have given the dead back their identities are they released to families for burial.
INSERT AUDIO: MORGUE POSTCARD
FX:: Zlatan speaking in Bosnian
ZLATAN: My name is Zlatan Shabanovic. The main purpose of this project is first of all to take care of exhumed bodies, to do an examination and to prepare everything for an identification process. And second goal will be to identify those remains…Maybe it would be good to go first in the storage room.
FX: DOOR OPENING AND SHUTTING
This is our storage room and actually it's a refrigerated room where we keep the bodies. We have complete, or relatively complete bodies - it's around one thousand nine hundred, there are still are one thousand unidentified complete bodies. We have body parts where we have around two thousand, maybe more than two thousand, body bags with just body parts. That means we have upper or lower body part of the body and that belongs to one person. And the third category will be communal remains or mixed body parts. For example in one body bag we have mixed bones from ten persons. That will be the hardest group to identify…The smell,, this is ammonia from the bodies you know, that's in the process of decomposition. You cannot do anything to destroy that smell. Even if you have this kind of temperature, this is good temperature just to slow down the process of decomposition. But you cannot change the smell…
FX: DOOR OPENING & CLOSING
SLOW FADE UP OF MUSIC AND HOLD UNDER
You know nobody tried to do something like this earlier. I think that we are the first who try to do mass identification you know. It's very hard to just start, to process the cases, and its really really slow process and we have to be careful because we cannot make mistakes here.
MUSIC FADES UP TO FULL, HOLD FOR FEW SECONDS AND SLOW DIP UNDER ED
The man accused of directing the massacre in which so many died, General Ratko Mladic, is of course still at large, as is his political master, the Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadic. But from the moment the two men were indicted by the war crimes tribunal in July 1995 they faced arrest if they went abroad.
Richard Holbrooke became Bill Clinton's Balkan negotiator the previous year. He was the architect of the Dayton Peace Treaty which eventually ended the fighting in Bosnia.
INTERVIEW: RICHARD HOLBROOKE
When I was ambassador to Germany in 1993 I didn't see, it wasn't immediately apparent to me how incredibly valuable the International War Crimes tribunal process would be as a device for both resolving conflicts and for the absolute critical truth and reconciliation process that follows. That only became apparent to me when President Clinton brought me back to Washington to take over the Bosnia negotiations and then I realised that the War Crimes Tribunal was a huge valuable tool. We used it to keep the two most wanted war criminals in Europe - Karadzic and Mladic - out of the Dayton peace process and we used it to justify everything that followed.
Did that not make things more difficult sometimes because there were people who would not talk to you because they would be locked up?
While at times somebody would have been indicted with whom it would have been useful to negotiate, in the final analysis this was a valuable process.
Was there any sense of this being a compromise between peace and justice in the way it was pursued after Dayton?
It's so interesting that you use the words peace and justice because it triggers a vivid memory in my mind. At the final critical moment, one minute to midnight in effect, of the negotiations at Dayton, we presented to President Izetbegoviic of Bosnia the latest concession of Milosevic. And said to him, "we have to decide now…there are 800 journalists waiting for the press conference. We have a failure statement ready. Here's Milosevic's newest concession." And Izetbegoviic listened, and there was a long pause, and he said "it is not just, but my people need peace." I thought my heart was going to stop. And he said "ok, let's do it". So Izetbegoviic used the same phrase you did, peace and justice. Now how do you reconcile the two? If you bury the past it can come up out of the muck of history and bite you again. And if you seek absolute vengeance you can't reconcile a society. You must find out what happened, you must publish it and then you must seek a way of reconciliation.
FX: LAB
DIP UNDER ED
Grim necessity has proved the mother of world-class inventiveness in Tuzla. Usually police investigations use DNA as a final confirmation of identity - after going through the more conventional steps like checking dental records. Here, with so many victims and so little to go on, it is a starting point.
They use DNA sampling first to establish which body parts belong together - remains in a mass grave can be jumbled up, especially if they have been disturbed by someone trying to cover up the evidence. And while most police labs need blood samples from someone's father and mother to make a match, that is often impossible here because in many cases whole families were killed. The Tuzla team have developed the technology so that even a sample from a distant relative is enough.
Adnan Rizvic is Head of the Identification and Co-Ordination programme at International Commission for Missing Persons.
INSERT AUDIO: DNA LAB POSTCARD
Adnan talking in Bosnian
OK, the reception. Sometimes we have a visit of the family groups and they're giving the blood samples here which means that we have everything here. From 60 to 100 per day, blood samples coming here.
This is let's say the heart of the complete programme because what we are doing here is the matching, ok, and I will show you now matching…Ok this is a bone sample taken from a non-identified body. And we got the results of the DNA results. Then, pressing this button we are pushing the profile of this bone through the complete database of 45,000 blood samples already collected. (Bosnian word) You will see….
FX: BLEEP
We have a match.
MUSIC FADES UP THEN DIPS UNDER ACT
We are not living in the perfect world and that we will always have a problem with the missing in the world. Which means that if you a good developed system like we have, maybe the future war crimes will be stopped because someone will say "hey listen, it's possible to discover all the secrets, it's not possible to hide the evidence you know". We are returning the names to the victims.
ED: A thousand people have been given back their identities using the technique; the matches are being clocked up at a steady 25 a day, as more and more of the shocking statistics of the Bosnian war become individuals again.
But the meticulous pursuit of evidence is not itself enough to make the Hague Tribunal work. The Chief Prosecutor, Carla del Ponte, may be able to put together a water-tight case, but without an accused to put on trial it's not much good. Her most famous defendant so far is of course the Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic. He was kicked out of power in a revolution three years ago, but it was a good old fashioned display of American economic and diplomatic muscle that finally delivered him to her court; Washington told the Serbians that they wouldn't get any aid unless they handed Mr Milosevic over.
INTERVIEW: CARLA DEL PONTE
CARLA: Of course United States have a good card to play because Belgrade is expecting and needed to have financial aid so of course to put a deadline was extremely important.
What is at stake in the longer term with the Milosevic trial? If you fail to secure a conviction the damage to the Tribunal and to its standing could be devastating couldn't it?
CARLA: I've no particular problem. Until now I'm convinced we present enough evidence to obtain a conviction. So it is not a question for me now.
Ok, alright take it the other way, if you succeed, what does it mean? It's a huge milestone isn't it, not just in terms of him but …
CARLA: It is, it is. Of course it is. In particularly it is that the leaders, the top leaders, have no more impunity. That is the main concern for international justice because you know the executors, the low level perpetrators, they come to justice in the national system. But it is near impossible to have a President or a Prime Minister or a General in trial in his own national system. And that is what we achieve here with this Tribunal.
You're still waiting for one or two people - Messeurs Karadic and Mladic. What is your interpretation about why they havn't been arrested?
CARLA: It's a good question but I have no answer, I have no answer. It is incredible, it's incredible that since 8 years both are at large. So of course I thinking I'd like to know why. But it is just a supposition from my side to say "hmm it's a political will which doesn't really exist, we have a lot of information that Mladic is in Serbia so I need more pressure from the international community to Belgrade to arrest Mladic. Or are there other reasons…I don't know. But this Tribunal will not close the door without having Karadzic and Mladic. After Milosevic they are the most responsible for these terrible horrendous crimes. So it is not justice if we cannot have Karadzic and Mladic.
FX:: SREBRENICA ROUND TABLE
ANNOUNCER: Thank you very much Mr Hodzic. And now I would like to ask Mr Mark Harmann, prosecutor at the Hague prosecutor's office to speak.
HARMANN: Thank you very much distinguished guests, it's an honour and a privilege to be a participant at this round table.
FADE SPEECH DOWN AND KEEP UNDER ED
ED: A UN conference in Sarajevo. Representatives of all Bosnia's communities have been invited to an exercise in truth-telling.
FADE SPEECH DOWN
The fighting may have ended in Bosnia in 1995, but the country remains as divided as ever and each community still has its own myths about what happened. Even a fact as big as the Srbrenica massacre is not believed by many Bosnian Serbs.
FADE UP SPEECH
The Tribunal was created by a resolution of the United Nations Security council
FADE SPEECH DOWN
The man with the task of dispelling different versions of history rooted in prejudice and replacing them with an accurate understanding based on evidence is Refik Hodzic from the UN Tribunal in the Hague. He organised this conference.
INSERT AUDIO: REFIK
FX:: Refik talking in corridor at conference
REFIK: This is an event where we will try to get the main opinion makers of the country to face the facts about Srebrenica themselves and spreading this information further and in that way achieving a consensus on the level of society about the events which have taken place at Srebrenica which will provide satisfaction for the victims.
FX: FADE CORRIDOR OUT UNDER ED
The Balkans tribunal led naturally to the idea of a permanent UN court to try war crimes. In 1998 a standing International Criminal Court was established by a treaty signed in Rome.
What happens in Bosnia next will test the link between the UN's traditional role as the bringer of peace and guarantor of security, and its new role as the fount of international justice. When Paddy Ashdown took over as the High Representative in Bosnia last year he came with a conviction that peace and justice are two sides of the same coin.
INTERVIEW: PADDY ASHDOWN: (4'06)
ASHDOWN: What is true is that you cannot have peace without justice. You cannot have a stable peace here while the people who committed these monstrous crimes have not been brought to retribution. The bailful curse of Karadic wondering in the mountains of the Zelinora - between here and Montenegro in felt nation-wide - it holds up the process of stabilisation. But much more important than that - if you are a refugee woman returning to Srebrenica and you see … walking the streets of nearby Zvornik, dressed in a police uniform, the very man who you know slaughtered your husband and your son - you're not likely to feel very secure. So, this business of clearing up the war criminals - it has to be done by bringing the big people to justice - the Karadic's, the Mladic's - that must be done in the Hague. Then when you've done that there may, after you have tackled the great burdens or the terrible crimes, there may be role for peace and reconciliation a la South Africa.
Do you think it's fair to say that in the early days there was a lack of political will to get Karadic and Maladic?
ASHDOWN: No I really don't think there was. For those who sit comfortably at home criticising NATO and the military here let me just remind you that we haven't caught the Omagh bomber, we haven't caught the people who committed some of the worst outrages in Northern Ireland where we control every blade of grass that moves. Imagine trying to do that with a single man moving amongst the population that, regrettably, still regards him as a hero within one of the wildest mountain vastness' in Eastern Europe. So, you know, it's very easy for people sitting at home in their armchairs to say why haven't you got this single man? Come out here, take a look at these mountain ranges - you begin to understand why it's not quite so easy.
Do you think there's any problem about the fact that it's the UN running the Hague process given that in large parts of Bosnia the UN is a very compromised organisation?
ASHDOWN: I think the answer … straight answer to you question is no. The ICTY in the Hague is not regarded as UN it's regarded as a self standing organisation and it's head - that female bulldozer - Carla del Ponte, is not regarded by anybody as ineffectual.
You mentioned the possibility of some kind of South African style truth and reconciliation process. Why did that work so well in South Africa and yet in Bosnia you talk about it as really, sort of, distant dream.
ASHDOWN: Well because there weren't two hundred and fifty thousand people killed in South Africa. Thank God. You know, I just ask you to think about this that arguably seven thousand killed in three days in Srebrenica - can you imagine that in Belfast. To ask us to move it from a position in which Bosnia lost proportionately more people than most European countries in the course of the 2nd World War to a peace and reconciliation commission without the intervening stage or serious justice against those who committed these crimes would, I think, be going a little too far.
POSTCARD:
INSERT AUDIO: HAGUE OPENING
MUSIC
ANNOUNCER: The International Criminal Tribunal for former Yugoslavia is now in session. Please be seated.
MUSIC
TRIAL ANNOUNCER: Good morning your honours. Case number IT9937I. The Prosecutor vs Slobodan Milosevic.
MUSIC
PROSECUTOR: We will submit at the conclusion of the evidence that the accused intended to destroy the Bosnian Muslim community, that genocide was the natural and foreseeable consequence…
MUSIC
SLOBO: IN SERBO CROAT
MUSIC
FX: in hall outside the court at the Tribunal
FADE UNDER ED AND HOLD
ED: The trial of Slobodan Milosevic at the Hague is now in its twentieth month - it is the longest running war crimes trial ever, and the first time a former head of state has faced a court of international justice.
The successes of the Hague tribunal gave impetus to the case for the International Criminal Court to administer international justice.
But although 89 nations signed up to the new court when it was established by the agreement in Rome, America, the country which originally inspired the idea of international justice has refused to ratify the treaty.
Kim Holmes is a senior State Department official responsible for American policy towards multi-national institutions like the Court and the UN.
INTERVIEW: KIM HOLMES
We were concerned that the tribunal and the court could become politicised and aimed unfairly at the United States. And we have seen the cases of the Belgian court where there have been what we believe are some very irresponsible indictments coming out against some very prominent US citizens and officials. We always felt that this issue should have been rooted in the security council where we thought it was originally intended. Unfortunately it was taken out of that context and put into an international treaty. We feel that without that kind of rooting in the Security Council that we should not support it.
Putting it in the Security Council would give the permanent five members a veto over its actions. So you would feel insulated to a degree from what you might regard as frivolous political prosecutions?
That's right. If we found ourselves in an extreme situation where we felt there was a politically motivated prosecution then we would have had that veto right.
Is part of the problem its legitimacy. In Britain a court action is taken in the name of the crown, in America it's taken in the name of the people. It's quite difficult to see who a court is speaking for on the international stage?
Well that's an interesting distinction. I mean we believe that our constitution is sovereign in that it was created through a democratic process of popular sovereignty and its accountable. If a court or a judge oversteps its boundaries and does something that's either unjust or corrupt, then there is a process by which that judge or that court can be held accountable by the American people. We did not feel that the international criminal court respected that constitutional process of popular sovereignty that all Americans believe we must have in order to respect the decisions of a court.
Accept of course your constitution also gives the judiciary independence from the legistature, from the executive, from politics if you like. If you put the international court into the Security Council you would be bringing it under political control to a degree wouldn't you?
Yeah, but our courts aren't entirely out of political control either because the senate approves our supreme court nominees, and some judges at a local level are elected by a democratic process. So there is recourse through the people to recall a judge or even at some point, if you decide to even change the constitution, the congress of the United States has the ability to do that as well.
In the aftermath of the war in Iraq America had to justify its refusal to accept the new international criminal court at the United Nations - in June the Canadians forced a public debate on the issue. On this particular question even Britain - so often America's loyal ally in these matters - takes a different view.
FADE UP:
BRITAIN: Whilst we understand US concerns about the international criminal court we do not share them.
UNITED STATES: The United States yields to no country. The international criminal court does not operate under the same democratic and constitutional context
GERMANY: Germany is confident that experience will show that the International criminal court is going to work impartially justly…
FADE DOWN
The fault-lines were exactly those which were exposed with such clarity during the debate over Iraq in the run-up to the war; American self-belief in its own standards and the justice of its own ambitions, coming into conflict with the concept of shared sovereignty which lies at the heart of the whole UN experiment.
Mary Robinson, the former President of Ireland, has a ringside view of the debate in the United States and at the UN; she runs a campaigning group in New York now, and she was, of course, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights during a period when ideas in the field evolved dramatically. Se believes the administration of international justice was a critical part of the process
INTERVIEW: MARY ROBINSON
It is extraordinarily important. That's something I learned during my five years as high commissioner. The terrible corruption and corroding effect of impunity when there is no recourse. I saw that in Sierra Leone, in East Timor. I found that people were angrier than just after the referendum and the taking over by the UN initially and their new government because there had not been justice and because the human rights court in Jakarta was completely inadequate. And people were seething with anger because there was no healing. Because there had been no taking stock of the terrible injustices done.
How significant a step down that road is the establishment of an international court itself and how damaged is the process by America's refusal to take part in it?
I said at the time that it was the most significant new institution of a new century and I am interested that certainly in the legal community here in the United States although there is a concern about certain aspects of it there is an understanding of the importance of the court and I don't rule out the possibility over time that the United States will come back to adherence.
I suppose you could look at it and say it is going to be difficult to persuade a country which is so overwhelmingly powerful and which also regards itself as the font if you like of a lot of the ideals of human rights and indeed justice that are being discussed in the court actually to submit itself to that kind of international justice.
I think it is very important because of the significantly more visible superpower role of the United States, particularly since the terrible attacks of 9/11, since the war on Iraq that it does link into and support the international human rights framework. When the United States talks about freedom and human rights outside the United States, people take their standard from the United States - if they are not upholding then the standard slips world-wide which we have seen happening.
If you look for example at what has happened over accusations that the Americans violated human rights of some of the immigrants they rounded up immediately after 11th September - they have gone through a process of investigating that, they have found out what was wrong and they are trying to correct it and I suppose you could say that it is only countries which have failed legal systems for which you need international courts and countries like the United States can deal with it themselves.
I think one of the overarching principles of human rights is the universality of human rights, that the universal declaration was written in terms of it being a framework for all countries, developed and developing. It was part of my approach as high commissioner to stand for the integrity and universality and inter-relationship between all human rights and therefore it was necessary - and I did as High Commissioner - criticise the United States, not because I wanted to pick on the United States but I recognised that it was particularly important for the integrity of the human rights standards because if the United States was not criticised when it fell below the standards then how do you uphold that standard elsewhere.
FX:: Outside the Tribunal with fountain in background.
The Balkans war crimes tribunal is somewhat incongruously housed in an unpretentious nineteen-fifties office block - plashing fountain and all - on the outskirts of the Hague. The Dutch capital melds into a seaside resort here, and not far away there are bands and balloons and restaurants selling chips and good shell-fish on the promenade. Inside crimes like the massacre of Srebrenica are relived in the courtroom, and a new chapter in humanity's attempt to grapple with evil is being written.
Emir Suljagic has come to the Hague to report back to survivors of Srebrenica on the progress of the Milosevic trial. He came through the massacre himself - he was a translator for the Dutch peacekeeping troops in the town when it there took place.
EMIR: Well when I first came here I was hoping that when the trial starts, or eventually when it gets to some sort of end, I and so many other people will have some sort of closure. We'll be able to say "alright, that's it. The guy we held responsible for ruining our lives is not only in the dock, but there's a great probability that he'll end up in jail for life". But the thing is it didn't happen. This really is taking too long. There is still so much politics involved in bringing about justice.
BRING UP MUSIC
ED: In 1945, at the time of the UN's creation, international justice meant the victors' justice of the Nuremberg Trials, and the rules were written by the leaders of conquering nations.
Today victims like Emir are at the heart of the way the new instruments of international law are being used, and that change reflects a more general movement towards the idea that any debate about governance should take the rights of the individual as its starting point.
Many people believe that only a supranational body like the UN can really guarantee those rights - America has been the principle opponent of that proposition. Yet the progress towards a system of international justice would never have got anything like this far had it not been for the exercise of raw American military and economic power, and the intellectual power of the idea of individual rights. And that is genetically embedded in the DNA of the United States constitution.
EMIR: You talk to any survivor in Bosnia, you talk to any survivor of any crime, you talk to Holocaust survivors, you talk to survivors of the Rwandan genocide, you'll see that the most important thing for them is for the truth to get out.
MUSIC TO CLOSE
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