If the international criminal tribunal for the former Yugoslavia were a proper court of law, the charges against him would have been dismissed long ago. Unfortunately, it is a highly politicised organ, created on the initiative of the very states which attacked Yugoslavia in 1999, and whose judges have disgraced themselves by bending the rules to facilitate the prosecution's task. In 2004, the judges imposed defence counsel on Milosevic, even though the ICTY's charter states that defendants have the right to defend themselves, and even though they knew he was too sick to stand trial. On February 24 2006, at the prosecution's insistence, they rejected Milosevic's request to be transferred to a heart clinic: he died a fortnight later.

It is corrosive of the core values of western civilisation for the chief Hague prosecutor, Carla del Ponte, now to say that Milosevic escaped justice by dying, for this assumes that "justice" means not due process but a guilty verdict. The day we start to believe that we will have abandoned the rule of law completely.