Virtually a kangaroo court

When Slobodan Milosevic died, more than four years into his trial for war crimes, newspapers around the world said that he had cheated justice. It would have been more accurate to say that he had cheated injustice. Had he lived, the judges would have been faced with an unpleasant dilemma: either to find him not guilty, thus casting a lurid light upon the past activities of their employers, the powers that had brought the tribunal into being in the first place, or to find him guilty and to sentence him to a long prison term on evidence that would not have justified a fine for illegal parking.

As John Laughland shows in this short, lucid and well-written book, 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. The trial of Milosevic cost about $60 million, and the transcript ran to 50,000 pages. These facts alone irresistibly bring to mind Einstein’s remark when he was told that 100 Aryan scientists had signed a letter condemning his theory of relativity: if they were right, he said, one would have been enough.

The tribunal made up its own rules as it went along, and then broke them if they proved inconvenient to the prosecution. The judges were men plucked from well-merited obscurity into the world limelight. It allowed the merest tittle-tattle, of the I-heard-it-from-Smith-who-had-it-from-Jones variety, as evidence. When the presiding judge, Sir Richard May, fell ill and resigned four years after the trial started (he may not even have been compos mentis at the end of his reign), the trial was not stopped, as the court’s procedure required, but another judge was drafted in who could not possibly have mastered the evidence, if for no other reason that, in the adversarial system, it is not only the verbal, but the non-verbal communication of the witnesses that is taken into account.