IN THE area called New Belgrade, they say, children knew the man with the flamboyant white beard as Santa Claus. That was not one of the names used by the fatherless and children of Srebrenica 13 years ago. Nor, in ruined Sarajevo, did they celebrate the gifts that came raining down from a jolly impostor and his host of grinning helpers.

You get the idea. Only crazed Serb nationalists could fail to welcome the capture of Radovan Karadzic, "poet", psychiatrist, tin-pot demagogue, ethnic cleanser, alternative medicine practitioner, genocidal chauvinist - and keen football fan. "Dragan Dabic" and his comedy beard have had a date to keep with justice ever since an indictment was handed down by The Hague tribunal in 1995. It's about time. It's long past time.

The hope, probably forlorn, is that the judges of the International Criminal Court (ICC) will not be waylaid, this time, by punctiliousness and a wily defendant, as they were when Slobodan Milosevic stood before them in 2002. On that occasion there was a sense almost of relief when Milosevic did the decent thing, for once, and died. This time, so everyone says, justice must be swift. Fat chance. Karadzic knows this game. His sort always do.

Still, there is general satisfaction. One of the truly bad guys has been tracked down, finally. Decency and the rule of international law are, thus far, vindicated. The ICC is half way to fulfilling its remit. That is, first, to demonstrate that there is no such thing as impunity for heads of government or state: a crime is a crime, no matter its author. Secondly, the court exists to deter all such potential criminals. They must know that they will always be found, and always punished. Who could argue with that?

The people who set up the ICC, among others. Though the court does not defer formally to the United Nations, it owes its charter, in part, to the five permanent members of the UN Security Council, and one article of the charter in particular. This gives the Security Council power to suspend any investigation or prosecution for a year. The catch being that the suspension can be renewed indefinitely if the council believes that the needs of justice are outweighed by other considerations.

How outrageous is that? Imagine you are Karadzic's lawyer. Tell me, you say to the court, are you seriously judging my client when the UN Security Council could make the entire case go away if they so chose? Is it because they don't like beards?

They certainly don't like the idea of a court that might adhere to legal principle pure and simple, not when there might be larger principles at stake or, if you prefer, favours to be traded. Zimbabwe might be a case in point.

Robert Mugabe and the Movement for Democratic Change are edging towards a deal. The old thug wants out from under a flattened economy, among other things. But would he co-operate if he believed that stepping down meant an instant indictment from The Hague? It seems unlikely. So what would be the pragmatic choice? Thousands more Zimbabweans suffering because Luis Moreno-Ocampo, chief ICC prosecutor, wanted to do his job, or effective immunity for Mugabe?

So much has already occurred in the case of Sudan and its president, Omar al-Bashir, chief villain of the Darfur catastrophe. Three years ago a security council resolution ordered him to co-operate with the ICC. Two of his henchmen, including his "minister for humanitarian affairs", were then indicted. Al-Bashir has refused to hand them over to The Hague. Now Mr Moreno-Ocampo aims to indict the Sudanese president himself, on the charge (there could be no other) of genocide. That should teach him.

But teach him what? Only what he already knows: international institutions are susceptible to threats and menaces. Indict me, says al-Bashir, and you can forget my co-operation with UN peace-makers. In other words, the murders, burnings, rapes and tortures in Darfur will go on. Given this individual's record, the mayhem might well be intensified, just to prove a point. And the ICC, in attempting to prove a point of its own, might well be accused of complicity in the deaths of thousands.

It is, on a benign reading, one pressing reason for the suspension clause in the ICC's charter. It means that in some circumstances the guilty can go free so that the innocent may be spared. But it also surely means that other presidential thugs and b******s-for-life will be encouraged to follow the example of al-Bashir. They will call the court's bluff. In other words, they will take hostages, but their hostages will be entire nations. And international law will be back where it started.

It started, in effect, at Nuremburg, of course. Certain hazy concepts were brought into focus. The idea that crimes could be committed against humanity itself began to gain ground. Yet read any of the Nuremburg transcripts and you will find nothing resembling a fair trial. That was never the purpose of the exercise, not with Stalin's prosecutors weighing in, with no sense of irony.

No one cared, or cares: the accused were Nazis. They got better, in terms of a hearing, than they deserved. Should we then conclude that the Allies committed not a single war crime? Dresden might have made for an interesting trial. Do we then decide that the Soviets were spotless? The raped and tortured women of Berlin, in their tens of thousands, might have stood as witnesses.

None of this is meant to excuse the Nazis, or Karadzic, or al-Bashir, or any of the rest of a sick company. Of course not. No- one ever stood trial, anywhere, for the 1915 Armenian genocide, and to this day the Turks refuse to say an honest word about their nation's killing of 1.5 million people. But victors' justice and victors' guilt are often not so very different. Many Serbs believe the ICC is a plot against their nation. Many Africans believe their continent is picked on. They would, wouldn't they?

Even when guilt is not denied, discrepancies are noted. Saddam Hussein was an ideal candidate for an ICC trial, but the basic principles of international law do not exempt George Bush, Tony Blair and the manner in which they waged their Iraq war. Then again, who won? And whose security council inserted that get-out clause in the ICC's charter, just in case? It is one thing to scoff at the idea of a British prime minister being indicted, another to explain just why, legally, he should escape investigation.

KARADZIC's lawyer will waste his time if he attempts any of this sort of stuff, of course. Men such as his client understand political realities. Besides, they rarely have useful alibis. It is simplistic, nevertheless, just to celebrate the bringing of a known, shameless killer to justice. Karadzic, like Saddam before him, probably concludes that his only real mistake was to lose. Had he been smart or lucky, like an al-Bashir or a Mugabe, he could have told international jurists where to stick their international justice.

Some argue for other roads to justice. South Africa's truth and reconciliation process is one admired example. But that method, too, has its problems and its contradictions. In any case, the chances of its success in the Balkans are slim indeed. The reality is that some mass-murdering thugs are made to answer for their crimes and some, conspicuously, are not. The real trick might be to find a way to prevent the crimes before they are committed.

Defenders of the ICC say that is precisely why the court exists. The hope is that when everyone, everywhere, realises that no one is above the law, psychopaths will think twice. The evidence, as lawyers might say, is open to question. Psychopaths don't think that way, if they think at all.