Plea-bargaining happens in most courts, so nobody was upset last month when former Serbian police officer Darko Mrdja, after a year in the custody of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, changed his plea to guilty of having massacred over 200 Croatian and Muslim men in August, 1992. He will probably get a lighter sentence, but the court will save a lot of time, and Mrdja may testify against his ex-colleagues.

In an imperfect world, this can be tolerated, but what are we to make of the haggling about indicted war criminal Charles Taylor in Liberia? He wants an amnesty and it looks like he's going to get it.

The United Nations-backed Special Court for Sierra Leone has already lost one of its big fish, Foday Sankoh, the back-country warlord who chopped off hands, arms and legs in a reign of terror that killed 70,000 Sierra Leoneans. Sankoh died of a stroke this year after over two years in custody, but no trial.

Taylor trained with Sankoh in Libyan guerilla camps, and even before his own rebel movement came to power in Liberia in 1997, he was in league with Sankoh to keep Sierra Leone in turmoil so that they could jointly loot the country's rich diamond deposits. The Special Court for Sierra Leone issued a 17-count indictment against Taylor in June and moves to give him "a safe haven" in Nigeria began in July.

The Special Court in Sierra Leone has little reach beyond that country's borders: the man who is responsible for around 200,000 deaths in Liberia will probably get away scot-free. And this is why we need the International Criminal Court.

Current attempts to bring genocidal killers to justice around the world are scattered and stumbling. Cambodia has just announced that only the ten most senior surviving Khmer Rouge leaders will stand trial for the slaughter of the ?killing fields? that cost 1.7 million lives in the late 70s. Prime Minister Hun Sen, a former Khmer Rouge commander himself, limited the trials to this relative handful, a quarter-century late and before a tame local court, because no established international authority could insist on anything else.

Or look at the US and British attempts to remove Carla Del Ponte as chief prosecutor for the Interna-tional Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. They aim at stopping her from expanding the indictments beyond members of the former Hutu government to include members of the current Tutsi-led government of Rwanda. Since she serves at the pleasure of the Security Council, the US and Britain may get their way.

If no permanent and independent body has the authority to deal with this sort of crimes, then it will be politics that decides who is punished and who gets off. The Inter-national Criminal Court was designed to move the world on from that primitive system. But it is under heavy assault by the current US administration, which loathes the very idea of the ICC. Why?

The United States says that it fears that American soldiers engaged in international peacekeeping operations might be victims of nuisance prosecutions brought by the ICC, whose judges it does not control. Yet, no UN peacekeeper of any nationality has ever been accused of mass rape and murder, genocide or cannibalism. The real US objection is ideological. The Bush administration sees all international structures that are beyond Washington's control as potentially hostile curbs on the exercise of American power.

Nevertheless, the ICC is up and running. Two hundred files are awaiting investigation (not one of them involving Americans). It will take time for the ICC to have an impact, because it cannot deal with crimes committed before July, 2002. It will take even more time because of American attempts to sabotage it.

The goal is to create a single standard and a single authority for dealing with genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity when governments are unable or unwilling to act. Ten years from now we will probably be a lot closer to that goal.

Gwynne DYER