Karadzic Arrest Shows the Hague's Value

For all those who doubt the effectiveness of an International Criminal Court warrant, just look at Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic. Samantha Power imagined the arrest differently when she was reporting from Sarajevo in 1995, but his diminished circumstances now show just how crippling and demeaning it is to run from the international community, she writes in Time.

Though the ICC has been dragged through the mud for trial delays and the failure to capture fugitives like Karadzic, just the threat of arrest is an international good. It can “establish a historical record,” Power writes, and “provide dignity to victims,” but most of all, it effects the “stigmatization and incapacitation of really bad people. Even to the world's worst actors, that can be a powerful incentive to behave.” (More Radovan Karadzic stories.)