The international court

Kofi Annan has welcomed the new international war crimes tribunal. For the United Nations secretary-general, it is central that the world organization gets the project under way. The UN was founded "as a stage in the worldwide fight against regimes that are guilty of mass murder on a terrible scale," he wrote.

Annan does not hide the fact that the result was a compromise. He would rather have seen the court get more far-reaching powers and that "the great powers' full support" had been there from the beginning. The point was -- even if it was not stated in the article -- mainly directed toward the United States, which voted against the court out of concern that its own soldiers would be put on trial. Annan, nevertheless, thinks that even the Americans will, with time, come to "see the value of this new, important undertaking".

-- Dagens Nyheter, Stockholm