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Until recently, the attempt to prosecute and punish individuals guilty of crimes against humanity during wars was an ad hoc business, and largely a matter of the winners in a war punishing some of the leading members of the defeated enemy society. Alternatively, it was a matter of domestic courts trying people from defeated countries or even, in the case of Germany, from their own population, under a patchwork of domestic and international law. The Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal was such a matter of victors punishing losers, and it set the precedent for the legitimacy of international action against those guilty of war crimes. In the 1990s the gradual shift away from the classic doctrine of national sovereignty and a greater acceptance of the rights of the international community to police itself, combined with several shocking returns to barbarism, especially in the former Yugoslavia, led to the creation of new tribunals. The most important is the tribunal created by the UN in 1993 to deal with crimes against `international humanitarian law' in the countries of the former Yugoslavia. This tribunal is still sitting, and in 2001 was successful in arranging the deportation of the former political leader of Yugoslavia, SlobodanMilosÆevic to face trial. Another such tribunal was created in 1994 to prosecute those guilty of offences in Rwanda. This, though doubtless equally necessary, has the slightly unusual character of being effectively an external punishment of those guilty of horror during an internal ethnic conflict. As a precedent it may indeed be more important, as it signals an even greater breach of the doctrine of national sovereignty. Clearly such ad hoc tribunals, however effective and impartial, will always

risk the appearance of being unsystematic and post hoc responses to specific events. What is needed, and this has now been accepted internationally, is a criminal version of the permanent international court, the International Court of Justice (see also international law). Thus, in 1998, an international conference in Rome under UN auspices finalized the statute of an International Criminal Court, which will have jurisdiction over war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide. It is also supposed to have jurisdiction over the rather vague crime of aggression, but it is unclear whether this will ever be

defined in a way acceptable to powerful members of the international system. The court lacks full support, especially from the USA (which indicated its refusal to participate in 2002), but it is scheduled to come into effective existence in July 2002. Exactly how powerful a body it will be remains to be seen. Although ad hoc tribunals have their problems, they are at least well supported by the states who create them; a permanent court would have to rely on a longer-term legitimacy, even in situations where it did not have backing from a few powerful and closely concerned powers. The really important element in modern war crimes tribunals, whether they be ad hoc or the permanent court, is that there must be a guarantee that they will come into operation after conflicts. The successes of the tribunal dealing with the former Yugoslavia mean that there is now a possible deterrent effect. Previously trials like those at Nuremberg were justified largely as retribution, as the making of a moral point. But if it comes to be expected that losers in any conflict will be punished for crimes against humanity, international criminal law may come to function as domestic criminal law is intended.