It's almost midnight, and George Bush is asleep in his Moscow hotel suite when plainclothes police bang on the door. Through an interpreter from the Russian Foreign Ministry, they announce that they are placing the visiting former U.S. President under arrest on an extradition request from Iraq. He is charged with war crimes, including an air attack during the Gulf War that targeted an underground bomb shelter and killed hundreds of civilians.
That imaginary scene does seem farfetched, but it is the kind of thing officials in Washington and other capitals are starting to take seriously. It is very close to what happened to another ex-President, Chile's General Augusto Pinochet Ugarte, in a London hospital in October. Pinochet may end up being shipped off to Spain to stand trial on charges of torture and mass murder. The families of his thousands of victims are rightly cheering, and human-rights activists are delighted that the world may no longer be safe for retired tyrants. But officials in perfectly upstanding governments note that nowhere in the rules now coming into play is it written that they can be applied only to dictators. Henry Kissinger has enemies out there, and so does Margaret Thatcher.
It took a ruling in Britain's highest court that Pinochet was not covered by official immunity to highlight a dramatic but almost unnoticed evolution under way in international law. The premise that national leaders cannot get away with mass murder and torture has been on the books since the Nuremberg and Tokyo war-crimes trials and is reinforced by resolutions at the U.N. It's also backed by international treaties banning genocide, torture and terrorism.
What was lacking for so long was enforcement, but the international community has been building a set of rules and procedures that are proving surprisingly effective. The impetus for recent reforms is the awful carnage committed in Rwanda and Bosnia. The U.N. Security Council responded by setting up special-purpose war-crimes tribunals in the Hague and Arusha, Tanzania. Last July, 160 countries sent delegates to Rome to prepare a statute for a permanent international criminal court, and 120 voted for it. The U.S. refused to go along, but nonetheless the new tribunal will come into existence when 60 countries ratify the statute.
The man atop the human-rights wave right now is Baltazar Garzon, 43, a hard-charging investigative judge of Spain's National Court. Two years ago, he began looking into human-rights abuses against Spanish citizens in Argentina, which were linked to Chile by a scheme called Operation Condor. With this plan, Pinochet and other South American junta leaders pooled their deadliest secret-police units to crush resistance to their rule. Garzon concluded that Pinochet is not covered by the traditional legal tenet, called sovereign immunity, one aspect of which protects national leaders from prosecution. Garzon argues that it does not apply because murder and torture are not legitimate parts of a head of government's job. Britain's Law Lords agreed, and Home Secretary Jack Straw has until Dec. 11 to decide whether he must let the extradition proceed or send the 83-year-old Pinochet home on humanitarian grounds.