Dublin - British courts had the opportunity to make case law which could shape the conduct of the new International Criminal Court in its decisions on Gen Augusto Pinochet, according to an expert on international relations, writes Angela Long. Prof Fred Halliday of the London School of Economics said he believed the tacit co-operation of the British government with the detention and legal process on the former Chilean dictator was part of the new "`ethical dimension in foreign policy" announced last year by the British Foreign Secretary, Mr Robin Cook. The ICC, which will be charged with dealing with genocide and its initiators, was agreed at a United Nations-sponsored conference in Rome last summer.
He told an audience at Trinity College Dublin that the failure to arrest war criminals such as Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic was a stain on all the surrounding European states. "They all have more than mud on their faces, if a little less than blood on their hands," he said of western powers' behaviour before and during the Bosnian conflict. The Dublin-born professor, in the first of a series of lectures organised by the Irish School of Ecumenics in Milltown, Dublin, said, however, he believed the great threat to world peace, "the most irresponsible international act" in 50 years, had been the reciprocal detonations of nuclear devices by India and Pakistan earlier this year.