Government is about making and implementing public policy choices. These are neither always easy nor always right. Governments, like individuals, do make mistakes. But in democracies, the task of making decisions on behalf of the people is delegated to elected representatives who then answer to the courts on constitutionality and to the people on the consequences of their choices.

At the same time, every society, including international society, always has some members whose intellectual conceit and moral arrogance lead them to want to substitute their judgment for the outcome of the democratic process.

David Forsythe of the University of Nebraska uses the phrase "judicial romanticism" for the idea of always looking to courts for a solution to every problem. In the commitment to justice at any price, the romanticists discount political and diplomatic alternatives. In the United States, President Richard Nixon would have been prosecuted for Watergate.

I saw this romanticism in action in New Zealand in the mid-1980s when many were unhappy that the government succumbed to French economic pressure and released the intelligence agents convicted of the "Rainbow Warrior" bombing.

Not everyone in South Africa was happy with the amnesty granted to some apartheid-era criminals by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Some in Britain would like to see IRA terrorists brought to book even at the cost of imperiling the peace accords.

And we see it within East Timor in calls for no compromise with the murderers of 1999.

Romanticism turns into judicial colonialism with demands that the political and diplomatic decisions made by democratically elected governments of other countries be subordinated to "international" judicial processes that reflect the values of the most dominant countries of the day.

It is based in moral imperialism: Our values are so manifestly superior to theirs that we have the right to impose it on them.

To appreciate this, consider two examples in the contrary direction. It is possible for reasonable people to disagree on the rights and wrongs of homosexuality and abortion. Both acts are prohibited in many countries, perhaps accounting for a majority of the world's population. Would those countries be justified in insisting that their moral position on homosexuality must be written into the domestic laws of Western countries? If so, is this an example of moral imperialism?

And, if they had the economic and military muscle, would strongly pro-life countries have the right -- nay, the moral duty, in the language of the humanitarian warriors -- to coerce us into ending the killing of thousands of innocent lives every year by taking doctors and women to criminal courts? If so, is this an an example of judicial colonialism?

Unlike domestic society, we lack functioning mechanisms of judicial accountability in world affairs. Some day hopefully every tyrant and warmonger will be hauled before international criminal courts. The U.N. Charter was never meant to be a tyrant's charter of impunity or his constitutional instrument of choice for self-protection.

The Holocaust in which several million Jews were systematically killed in the Nazi program to exterminate them -- the familiar cycle of pogroms modernized into industrialized and highly efficient mass slaughter -- retains a unique emotional resonance.

But repeating the slogan of "Never Again" requires chutzpah after the repeats of the horror of mass killings in Rwanda, Srebrenica, Darfur and elsewhere. As an old joke has it, you commit one murder, you get sent to trial and prison; commit 10, you get sent to an insane asylum; commit 10,000, you get sent to Geneva for U.N. peace talks.

Much as humanitarians might want to believe that they still hold up the virtue of truth to the vice of power, the truth is that the vocabulary of virtue has just as often been appropriated in the service of power. Nuremberg and Tokyo were instances of victors' justice. Yet by historical standards, both tribunals were remarkable for giving defeated leaders the opportunity to defend their actions in a court of law instead of being dispatched for summary execution.

The ad hoc tribunals of the 1990s for Rwanda and former Yugoslavia are important milestones in efforts to fill institutional gaps in international criminal justice. They have been neither unqualified successes nor total failures. While the international criminal tribunals have primacy over the operation of domestic court systems, the International Criminal Court has been constructed to give primacy to domestic systems and become operative only in the event of domestic unwillingness or incapacity.

After the Iraq war started in 2003, British Prime Minister Tony Blair and his defense and foreign ministers were accused of crimes against humanity by Greek lawyers who lodged a case with the ICC on July 28, 2003. The doctrine of universal jurisdiction was employed also to threaten prosecution against U.S. President George W. Bush and Gen. Tommy Franks (commander of the U.S. forces in Iraq).

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld retaliated by warning that if U.S. officials could no longer travel to Brussels without fear of prosecution, NATO headquarters would clearly have to be relocated to another country. In July 2003 Belgium amended its controversial law on universal jurisdiction and restricted trials in Belgian courts to crimes committed or suffered by its citizens or residents.

Truth commissions provide a halfway house between victors' or foreigners' justice and collective amnesia. The ad hoc tribunals have helped to bring hope and justice to some victims, combat the impunity of some perpetrators and greatly enrich the jurisprudence of international criminal and humanitarian law. But they have been expensive, time-consuming and contributed little to sustainable national capacities for justice administration. Truth commissions take a victim-centered approach, help to establish a historical record and contribute to memorializing defining epochs in a nation's history.

The ethic of conviction would impose obligations to prosecute people for their past criminal misdeeds to the full extent of the law. The ethic of responsibility imposes the countervailing requirement to judge the wisdom of alternative courses of action with respect to their consequences for social harmony in the future.

Of the four sets of actors in global governance, nongovernmental organizations remain more fiercely resistant to calls for independent accountability for the consequences of their actions than governments, international organizations and multinational corporations. The fault line between activists and policymakers is no longer as sharp as it used to be.

Harvard University's David Kennedy argues that humanitarian actors often deny the reality of bad consequences flowing from good intentions. Humanitarian actors are participants in global governance as advocates, activists and policymakers. Their critiques and policy prescriptions have demonstrable consequences. With influence over policy should come responsibility for the consequences of policy.

The ICC offers hope for a permanent reduction in the phenomenon of impunity. In 1990, a tyrant would have been reasonably confident of escaping international accountability for any atrocities. Today, there is no guarantee of prosecution and accountability, but not a single brutish ruler can be confident of escaping international justice. The certainty of impunity is gone. Fifteen years is a very short time in the broad sweep of history for such a dramatic transformation of the international criminal landscape.