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- guardian.co.uk, Friday March 3 2000 02.24 GMT
The Pinochet precedent marked an astonishing advance for global justice. It identified the Achilles' heel in the armour of state sovereignty - that legal fiction which had always protected political criminals. They no longer have immunity to charges of genocide and torture, because every state has an international duty to hunt down perpetrators of these crimes against humanity.
The House of Lords judgments in Pinochet have been hailed around the world. Only last month they became the basis for charges against Hassan Habri, who fled to Senegal in 1990 after murdering 40,000 during his reign of terror in Chad. As a result of the Pinochet arrest, international human rights law is no longer a pious fiction: it is actually capable of enforcement.
It is worth remembering that this could not have happened without Jack Straw, or at least a British government which was prepared to let the law take what turned out to be a momentous course.
Had Pinochet gone instead to New York for medical treatment and to take tea with Henry Kissinger, the US authorities would not have touched him. If brought before any court, criminal or civil, the state department would have followed its practice of issuing a letter of instruction to stop the proceedings. Although France, Belgium and Switzerland have very recently climbed on the "prosecute Pinochet" bandwagon, they were uninterested until the UK showed the way. The last thing the Spanish government wanted was a trial, and it has done its best to sabotage its own prosecutors.
The home secretary came under intense diplomatic pressure to let Pinochet go prematurely. Every powerful enemy of human rights weighed in on his behalf, from Jesse Helms and Dr Kissinger to the Vatican. Even Fidel Castro (mindful of the Cuban gulag) attacked Britain venomously last year for offending the sovereign dignity of Latin American states by detaining his mortal enemy.
So we can take considerable pride in the government's handling of this affair, from Scotland Yard's capture (after a tip-off from Hugh O'Shaughnessy in the Guardian) a few hours before he planned to flee the country, to its denouement. The home secretary quite rightly decided, on compelling medical evidence, that it would be oppressive to put on trial a man so brain-damaged that he could not understand the evidence or instruct his lawyers.
It would of course have been preferable to have sought the approval of the court which was due to hear Pinochet's appeal on March 20, although that would have been a foregone conclusion. Jack Straw's 7,000 word statement contains a few mistaken assumptions (Pinochet's apparently sensible demeanour is explained away by his high level of original intelligence, although the record suggests that he possesses a low cunning) and there is a failure to appreciate that the inquisitorial system in Spain places much less pressure on a defendant than trial by judge and jury in England. Given the diagnosis of irreversible brain damage after his strokes last October, however, justice could not be seen to be done under any system. If Pinochet does cartwheels in the streets of Santiago, it will be British medicine rather than law that will be the laughing-stock.
There is, of course, the richest of ironies that a dictator who denied human rights to the thousands he killed and tortured ends his life as the pathetic beneficiary of human rights standards. It is a poor reflection on our extradition procedures that he could play for time for so long. But the real lesson of Pinochet's escape from justice should be a renewed determination to round up other perpetrators of genocide and torture while they remain healthy.
That means pressure on Saudi Arabia to disgorge Idi Amin for trial at the Old Bailey, to be followed into the dock by Milton Obote who lives vulnerably in Zambia. Colonel Mengistu, the mass-murdering Marxist of Ethiopia, will not have Robert Mugabe to protect him in Zimbabwe for much longer, and Baby Doc Duvalier is on the loose somewhere in the south of France. The Nazi-loving ex-dictator of Paraguay, Alfredo Stroessner, is in retirement in Rio, and the penthouses of Panama are packed with mass-murdering Latin generals in exile.
Meanwhile, juxtaposed today with Pinochet's arrival in Chile will be the verdict on the much-decorated Croatian General Blaskic, tried for war crimes involving the killing of thousands of Serbs in the Krajina. He is the first powerful figure to be tried by this UN court. Nato must support it by arresting the indicted Bosnian Serb leaders Karadic and General Mladic, before they, too, start suffering strokes.
The struggle for global justice is far from over: of the 120 nations which agreed in 1998 to set up an international criminal court, only seven have so far ratified its statute. The revelry of the Pinochinistas as they welcome their brain-damaged hero should serve as a spur. That is the only consolation that can now be offered to Pinochet's victims: the knowledge that for tyrants of his ilk, the future is not what it used to be.
Geoffrey Robertson QC is the author of Crimes Against Humanity, Penguin
