The death of the genocidal tyrant Pol Pot in April this year caused a collective sigh of relief around the globe. For many ordinary people, the passing of the man who engendered the Killing Fields of Cambodia, in which a million lives were taken, was a relief. The monster was gone.
But for those who have the responsibility, either thrust upon them or assumed by choice, of policing the world and keeping its rulers "honest", the death of Pol Pot removed the problem which had been growing ever since the first reported sightings of him in the jungles of the Thai-Cambodian border late last year: how does the global society deal with - in effect punish - such a spectacular villain?
Next Monday week representatives of 100 countries start a mammoth meeting in Rome to try and pin down the concept of a world court. Two preliminary sessions have already been held to flesh out this idea. The concept of a permanent legal forum to deal with war crimes was most recently instigated by the United Nations Security Council. But it has been around for 50 years, since the end of the second World War, and the ensuing tribunals at Nuremberg were seen as effective in bringing some of the worst war criminals to book.
The proposed International Criminal Court (ICC) is seen as something with quite different jurisdiction from the existing International Court of Justice. This, officially described as the judicial arm of the United Nations, is based in The Hague and adjudicates mostly on disputes over territory or human rights. American sociologist and writer Michael Walzer describes the difference as being something like the distinction between burglaries and serious assaults on a person. Is the idea of a permanent international court to try particularly horrible crimes against humanity an idea whose time has come? Or is it an impractical notion whose inherent flaws are demonstrated by increasingly tortured experiences of "peacekeeping" forces at the world's flashpoints?
At present two separate tribunals are dealing with war crimes on a massive scale, by trying separately individuals who have been identified as taking part in the bloodletting. These are in Arusha, Tanzania, dealing with the Rwandan genocide; and The Hague, Netherlands, dealing with the Bosnian war.
Both tribunals have had their difficulties, says Rosemary Byrne of Trinity College's law school. Arusha recently gained its first conviction, but the defendant had pleaded guilty. The Hague has had a number of convictions, but its problem has been getting the alleged wrongdoers in the dock. Lurid stories of plans to grab the architects of the Bosnian Serbs' three-year war, Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic, seem based in fact, but the two men are still enjoying a comfortable, even luxurious, freedom.
What is uppermost in the mind of many legal experts and politicians across the globe is whether a permanent court of this kind could be established, to remove the uncertainty and teething problems of ad-hoc tribunals set up to deal with situations as they arise.
Michael Walzer, in Just and Unjust Wars, writes that "international law arises out of a radically decentralised legislative system, cumbrous, unresponsive, and without a parallel judicial system to establish the specific details of the legal code". This sums up both the dilemma and the required solution.
The legal experts gathering in the offices of the Food and Agriculture Organisation in Rome will wrestle with questions such as which crimes would be covered by such a court, who would initiate prosecution, and which legal code would be most closely emulated: a synthesis of Western systems (most likely) or something more like procedures followed in Islamic or Asian countries.
The three main stumbling blocks, according to Rosemary Byrne, are complementary: how to combine national systems with a satisfactory international legal framework; the "trigger" for court action; and the definition of aggression. It is already common ground that the court's work would be taken up with crimes of the order of genocide and unacceptable acts on populations or individuals. But the issue of sexual crimes - pregnancies caused by rape during war - has caused problems, as some observers claim that extreme women's groups are using this to work for fewer restrictions on access to abortion in developing countries.
However, Mary Lawlor of Amnesty International puts justice for women near the top of aspirations for an ICC. Amnesty is enthusiastic about the idea of such a world court, although anxious that it be properly constituted and achieve credibility. It has a detailed proposal for the court, taking in a number of requirements which it says must be included or "the court risks being an illusory remedy and perhaps even a setback for the rule of law and international justice".
The Irish Government is also in favour of the world court, and will be represented at the drafting conference in Rome. A Government spokeswoman says it plans a number of initiatives next week.
ONE of the leading campaigners for the ICC is the European Commissioner for Humanitarian Affairs, the dynamic Italian, Emma Bonino. She has been arguing strongly for the court in the past six years, and was one of the moving forces behind an impressively-signed appeal, published in The Irish Times and other leading world newspapers last December, for the world community to bite the bullet on creating such a court.
Her movement, No Peace Without Justice, boasts the former president of Ireland and United Nations Commissioner for Human Rights, Mrs Mary Robinson, the former secretary-general of the United Nations, Dr Boutros Boutros-Ghali, and the former US president, Mr Jimmy Carter, among its adherents. The full list of signatories to December's document read like a who's who of world politics.
Mrs Bonino hoped to answer her critics in a recent speech to the US Congressional Human Rights Caucus. "We need a credible court, one that presents a credible deterrent to the Pol Pots of the 21st century, with a constructive relationship with the Security Council."
Among the main countries working for the court are Sweden and Canada, whose foreign minister, Mr Lloyd Axworthy, has gained the praise of Mrs Bonino and others for his dedication. Mr Axworthy last month sought to allay the fears of his superpower neighbour, the US, about a world court.
Although officially backing the idea, the US has many reservations, because it is so often involved in "policing" operations around the world that its forces could be a target for many charges, some of which would be frivolous or unfair. The horrors of Bosnia - where peacekeepers were abducted or chained to posts, humiliated by television pictures of their plight being sent around the world - and Somalia, where nearly all countries participating came to grief, have made governments more wary of getting involved in internal conflicts.
David Scheffer, the US's quaintly-named "roving ambassador on war crimes", leads the US delegation for the ICC and is a keen proponent of the legitimate defence provision, that a country's troops cannot be held to account for actions taken within the legitimate limits of the Geneva Convention.
Mary Lawlor of Amnesty says she believes a statute for the establishment of a world court will be adopted in July, when the conference finishes its work.