* Any views expressed in this opinion piece are those of the author and not of Thomson Reuters Foundation.
By Ian Leist QC, partner at Redmantle
The arrest of former Bosnian army chief Ratko Mladic on May 26, some 15 years after the massacre of Bosnian Muslims in Srebrenica, has tested that old legal maxim "justice delayed is justice denied" to the core and highlighted that the success of international law undoubtedly depends on its acceptance and enforcement by the international community, fairly and non-selectively.
Examples such as Mladic's case and the arrest warrant against Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir, who has not been seized yet, show that politics can get in the way of enforcement.
Mladic is the last of three top Serbian leaders wanted for war crimes at the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague. There, he will join Bosnian-Serb wartime leader Radovan Karadzic, who was captured in 2008. Former Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic died in custody before his long trial was concluded.
Announcing Mladic's arrest, Serbia’s president Tadic claimed that a "stain" had now been removed from the people of Serbia.“This step is a testimony that Serbia is a state which has firmly established rule of law," he said later at a joint news conference with EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton.
Many will argue, however, that his arrest and delivery to The Hague by President Tadic's government was less an expression of the shared moral values of the Serbs with the rest of the international community, and more the political act of a country seeking to join the EU.
18 months away from re-election, and with entry to EU a key promise to the electorate, Tadic will hope any backlash from supporters of Mladic will have faded by then.
The arrest of Mladic in Serbia occurred shortly after Chief Prosecutor Brammertz reported to the UN Security Council in December 2010 that the Dutch, whose UN forces many Bosnians blame for the massacre at Srebrenica, were unlikely to agree to Serbia's candidature for membership, let alone entry, until fundamental reforms were implemented.
Ejup Ganic, a former member of Bosnia and Herzegovina's presidency during the war, who successfully resisted an arrest warrant in London last year on the grounds its issue was politically motivated, asserted that Serbia knew the whereabouts of Mladic but delayed his arrest until it was known that it would advance Serbia into the European Union.
BASHIR ARREST FACES HURDLES
Like Mladic's case showed, it is a long way from issuing an international arrest warrant to bringing the accused to trial.
In 2009 the ICC issued an arrest warrant for Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir for war crimes and crimes against humanity in the war-torn Darfur region. Last week, the court added three counts of genocide to the list of charges.
That did not stop Bashir from travelling to Chad, his first visit to the country, which is a member of the global court seeking his arrest.
Al-Bashir is the first sitting head of state ever indicted by the ICC. However, the Arab League and the African Union condemned the warrant. Al-Bashir has since visited Egypt and Qatar. Both countries refused to arrest him and surrender him to the ICC upon arrival. The African Union and the Arab League have always opposed the ICC's decision to issue the arrest warrants issued over the conflict in Darfur.
Chad's ambassador Ahmat Mahamat Bachir said it was merely following the AU's lead, despite a storm of protest from human rights groups.
"We are with the rule of law and everybody has to pay for his mistakes and for any crime he commits but when it will be selectively and targeting only African leaders it should not be accepted," he told the BBC's World Today programme, momentarily forgetting the victims of these alleged crimes are also Africans.
ICC member state Chad also refused to arrest al-Bashir during a state visit in July 2010. ICC prosecutor, Luis Moreno Ocampo and human rights group Amnesty International have both claimed that al-Bashir's plane could be intercepted in international airspace. Sudan announced that the presidential plane would always be escorted by fighter jets of the Sudanese Air Force to prevent his arrest.
Generally speaking, the ICC has a good record for giving defendants a fair trial and reaching just verdicts according to the evidence.
Of greater concern has been the difficulty in the execution of the arrests warrant in high profile cases. The execution of the ICC warrant is proving to be the litmus test which demonstrates if the international community is serious about international criminal justice.
Countries, who have signed the Treaty of Rome, and those who so far have refused to do so, at some point must realise that full membership of the international community depends upon full participation in the processes of the ICC, if the corresponding benefits of influence and prestige are to be maximised.
