Betwixt and between

The transfer of former Liberian dictator Charles Taylor to The Hague will likely occur in the next few weeks. The irony of the move is that tribunals like that in Sierra Leone were intended to bring international justice closer to the people affected. The court for the former Yugoslavia, based in The Hague, often received brickbats for being too ...

By , a professor at Indiana University’s Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International Studies.

The transfer of former Liberian dictator Charles Taylor to The Hague will likely occur in the next few weeks. The irony of the move is that tribunals like that in Sierra Leone were intended to bring international justice closer to the people affected. The court for the former Yugoslavia, based in The Hague, often received brickbats for being too distant from the Balkans to effectively enlighten the populations and facilitate reconciliation. Now, it seems, those arguments have quickly yielded to fears that Taylor's presence in the neighborhood could shatter the fragile peace.

The transfer of former Liberian dictator Charles Taylor to The Hague will likely occur in the next few weeks. The irony of the move is that tribunals like that in Sierra Leone were intended to bring international justice closer to the people affected. The court for the former Yugoslavia, based in The Hague, often received brickbats for being too distant from the Balkans to effectively enlighten the populations and facilitate reconciliation. Now, it seems, those arguments have quickly yielded to fears that Taylor's presence in the neighborhood could shatter the fragile peace.

I think it's the right calculation. My time in the Balkans led me to appreciate the value of just getting bad actors out of the picture. One-way tickets to The Hague cleared out plenty of political obstructionists in Bosnia and helped make possible today's (admittedly fragile) peace. Doing justice at home is the ideal, but justice at a distance beats violence at home any day.

David Bosco is a professor at Indiana University’s Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International Studies. He is the author of The Poseidon Project: The Struggle to Govern the World’s Oceans. Twitter: @multilateralist

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