This book makes an important contribution to the development of global justice. It is the most authoritative post mortem on the proceedings against Slobodan Milošević, which were hailed as the first ‘trial of the century’ of the twenty-first century. When Justice Jackson observed, apropos of Nuremberg, that ‘courts try cases, but cases also try courts’ he accurately described the Milošević case, a test for whether international courts can today deliver on the Nuremberg legacy that political leaders who mass-murder their own people can be made subject to human justice. In Mr Boas's expert verdict, it was a test that our fledgling system of international criminal justice only narrowly managed to pass.

Others, more prejudiced and less informed, regard the trial as a total failure. The White House, for example, has cited its inordinate length, its massive cost, and its inconclusive end as an argument against producing any kind of fair trial by an international court for the prisoners in Guantanamo Bay. Its short-comings were much in mind when the Iraqi Special Tribunal was set up to try Saddam Hussein: there were no international judges, no right of self-representation, no ‘friends of the court’ allowed to show friendship with a defendant whose death sentence was predetermined rather than self-inflicted. Those of us who champion international justice, and the International Criminal Court in particular, have winced and shuddered in disbelief as this showcase trial went on, and on, and on. It began in February 2002, but the prosecution case alone took three years.