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HERE is a living monument to one possible fate for international justice in a world of sovereignty. It is the Peace Palace, home of the International Court of Justice. The court sits in The Hague, the charming Dutch city, in soaring chambers within an eclectic 1913 brick palace in a campus of fountains and tidy gardens. More often called the World Court, it has been weighing claims among nations and dispensing opinions of right and wrong since just after World War I. It is a vestige of Wilsonian idealism, a burst of conscience and good intentions that opened the brackets on the twentieth century, just as another burst has closed them.

The World Court adjudicates civil disputes among nations -- quarrels over borders, or fishing rights, or the meaning of treaties, or the right to deem another country an aggressor. It has no power of enforcement or credible threat of punishment for noncompliance. Its only leverage is moral gravitas. The court weighs in, and lets opprobrium or vindication fall where it may. Many states ignore it when they wish. The United States sharply restricted its conditions for accepting the court's jurisdiction after Reagan-era decisions against it in a dispute with Nicaragua.

Flashback: "The Nuremberg Trials" (November 1995)
Two articles from 1946 consider the precedent set at Nuremberg fifty years ago.

In the fall of 1996, three and a half years after the tribunal was established, a new chief prosecutor arrived. She was Louise Arbour, a Canadian law professor and jurist, and she knew little of the substance of her enormous dossiers, or of the uncharted international law she would be seeking to define and then to enforce. But she understood what the real agenda was: to establish the war-crimes tribunal as an institution of truth and consequence.

The truth was far from easy to discern, given the vastness of the crimes Arbour was prosecuting -- a quarter of a million people slaughtered in a three- or five- or seven-headed ethnic conflict in the Balkans that has lasted through much of the nineties (and is not over); more than half a million massacred in 1994, in the space of a few weeks, in Rwanda.

Making the tribunal effective and credible meant not just establishing the historical record and determining where justice lay. It meant delivering. It meant testing, in the real world, the question of whether acts of genocide, crimes against humanity, and violations of the code of war would have real consequences for the people responsible.

Unlike the World Court, which judges states, the International Criminal Tribunal judges individuals. But in practice, this is a distinction without a difference. Individuals acting in the names of states perpetrate war crimes. Individuals acting in the names of states decide whether or not to cooperate with the war-crimes tribunal. Getting states to cooperate with the tribunal became Louise Arbour's daunting task. The unfolding horrors in Kosovo brought matters to a head.

N Friday, January 15, 1999, in the Kosovar village of Racak, forty-five ethnic-Albanian men, women, and children were rousted from their homes, driven into the nearby woods, and executed at close range by hooded Serbian security forces. Some were mutilated; one was decapitated. News of the Racak massacre reached Arbour in The Hague on Saturday morning, when she got home from grocery shopping to find a message asking her to call William Walker, the head of the international unarmed monitoring force -- under the aegis of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe -- known as the Kosovo Verification Mission.

"Turn on your TV," Walker said when she reached him. "It's even worse than what you'll see."

On Monday morning Arbour flew to Macedonia, next door to Kosovo. There she and Walker's deputy, Gabriel Keller, boarded a bright-orange armored vehicle and headed to the border to make plain Arbour's determination to investigate the grisliest single atrocity in nearly a year of Serbian repression.

Arbour did not think it likely that she could get past the frontier, but the Racak massacre had, she felt, compelled her to demand the access the Yugoslav government had been refusing her investigators for months. Launched on this effort, she wondered if the world was behind her, and she had good reason to wonder. Arbour had been frustrated for much of 1998, as the Serb-led government of what remains of Yugoslavia persisted in driving out and killing Kosovo's ethnic Albanians. These were war crimes, and the International Criminal Tribunal had asserted its jurisdiction over Kosovo early on. Western governments hoped that the threat of a tribunal investigation might cause Slobodan Milosevic, the President of Yugoslavia, to desist. The United Nations Security Council, the tribunal's sole institutional superior, had backed up the tribunal's authority in three resolutions, which were bolstered by tough pronouncements from Western leaders.

The tribunal's obvious agenda was to bring war-crimes charges all the way up to Milosevic. Arbour's slow, methodical compilation of a case against the Yugoslav President, and her stated desire to meet the toughest standards of evidence, had sometimes drawn scorn from impatient humanitarian organizations and Western governments. She had heard them say that she was moving too gingerly on the Kosovo dossier, that she ought to "go to Kosovo." She mocked the assumption that it fell to her to "take soil samples and witness testimony."

But in her two and a half years at the tribunal Arbour had discovered the great extent to which international decision-making was driven by the news media. She had also learned, after what many observers thought was a clumsy start, to use the media. Racak was the provocation she needed.

After Racak, Arbour had asked the NATO high command -- the so-called extraction force, known to insiders as "the dentists" -- to take her over the border to Racak under its protection, without visas or border formalities. As she put it later, dryly, "We wanted the insertion of the prosecutor by the extraction force." By diplomatic norms the request had been an outrageous one; Arbour had been refused. So she set out on her own.

Arbour and her team handed their official authorizations from the United Nations to enter Yugoslavia to the border guard, who took them away for inspection. Later she would see Serb state-run-television footage of the guard holding her passport open to show that she had no visa. The team was, of course, denied entry, despite Arbour's aggressive confrontation with the sergeant in command. Arbour is five feet tall, and she had left her body armor behind in the car. "Do you know who I am?" she asked the sergeant. He said he did. Arbour later told me, "I asked if he had instructions from Belgrade to refuse me, and he said no. I did not believe him for one minute." She and her party turned back.

The week after Racak was Arbour's lowest moment -- "the bottom of the pit," as she put it in one of the conversations we had last year, while events in the Balkans and in The Hague unfolded. I had been covering the International Criminal Tribunal for The Washington Post, and had met Arbour socially a few times during a previous assignment, in Canada, where she was an Ontario appeals-court judge. I had not gone along on the trip to Racak, so pointless did it seem to my editors and to me -- as a few days later it seemed to Arbour, too. "I felt very abandoned," she recalled. "I felt very alone. The pictures told the story: I had in a physical sense gone as far as I could, and I had to turn back."

But when Arbour returned to The Hague, she was surprised to find that the incident had crystallized the work the tribunal had been doing for six years. It framed the issues squarely: evidence of crimes, international condemnation, refusal of the sovereign authority to permit an investigation that its membership in the UN required. The foiled effort to enter Kosovo in January had propelled the tribunal from the sidelines into the center of the action -- and toward the first indictment of a sitting chief of state: Slobodan Milosevic.

It would be the International Criminal Tribunal's agenda, in the broadest sense, that provoked and then justified the first full-scale military operation in Europe in half a century, and the first operation of its magnitude to address a humanitarian disaster -- the killing of thousands of Kosovar Albanians and the deportation of nearly a million. NATO and the allied powers may have had other reasons to launch the bombing campaign against Milosevic, but the humanitarian argument was the one they advanced most aggressively. That they made the argument constituted an endorsement, not entirely witting, of an idea: The humanitarian imperative can transcend sovereignty.

This confluence of justice and power politics was at times turbulent, and remains deeply uneasy. Regardless, an extraordinary amount of rhetoric as well as of ordnance was deployed over Kosovo on behalf of the human-rights precept that undergirds the philosophy of the tribunal: There can be no real peace without justice.

The tribunal is an awkwardly growing institution without clear judicial parentage. No one lets the Yugoslavia tribunal forget that to date it has tried only a handful of mostly low-level war criminals. How this institution does its work will have a powerful bearing on whether a permanent International Criminal Court comes into existence. A hundred and twenty nations voted in Rome in 1998 to establish such a court -- the United States not among them.

In her first interview with The Washington Post after arriving in The Hague, Arbour referred to "what diplomats do." She said, "They try to get others to act in their own self-interest. I can't imagine that it's that hard." What she said of the diplomats' role could be said of what she herself set out to do -- but she found it very hard. Arbour, who had spent most of her career in law-school classrooms and judges' chambers, would soon be deeply immersed in criminal investigations, legal strategies, and international jurisprudence. She would also find herself daily, hourly, lobbying governments or the United Nations for money, for personnel, for classified information about her targets, for resources to exhume mass graves, and, most important, for acts of courage and political will: the arrest of indicted war criminals.

Enforcement and apprehension are the realms in which friendly states show their true colors. The tribunal has no police powers, no high-tech swat team responsible for snatching architects and agents of mass murder. In effect, the tribunal serves at the pleasure of the major powers -- especially the United States. "If I were in her shoes and I wanted the tribunal to work, I'd feel compelled to go along with the United States," observes M. Cherif Bassiouni, a war-crimes scholar who helped to lay the basis for the tribunal in work he did for the United Nations. "How far is a question each one of us must decide."

The tribunal can complain that it doesn't get enough help from its powerful friends, but Serbian leaders or any others who might come under the scrutiny of a permanent international court in the new century can ask themselves, reasonably enough, whether a court that is essentially the creature of their enemies can dispense justice fairly. The appearance of justice, as well as the reality of it, hangs heavily on the tribunal. Every assertion of jurisdiction, every move to prosecute, every procedural appeal, every sentence -- all these things may be decided on the merits, but always with the burden of knowing that the tribunal is also, and always, setting precedent.