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The Prosecution of International Crimes: A Critical Study of the International Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia

Edited by Roger S. Clark and Madeleine Sann
Reviewed by By Francis Fukuyama
November/December 1996
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Edited by Roger S. Clark and Madeleine Sann
Transaction Publishers
1996
502 pp.
$49.95

This book, consisting of articles previously published in the Criminal Law Forum, exhaustively documents the work of the ad hoc international tribunal set up to prosecute war crimes in the former Yugoslavia. It makes a meticulous legal case for the jurisdiction of such an international tribunal and will doubtless be of great use to those prosecuting similar cases in the future. It also demonstrates the irrelevance of a great deal of international law to the situation on the ground: the NATO Implementation Force could arrest indicted war criminals like Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic tomorrow if U.S. commanders weren't worried about retaliation from local Serbs, something one would not know from the chapter on "Securing the Presence of Defendants," which deals instead with the legal niceties of extradition and ensuring the rights of defendants.

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