The Bosnian envoy told Terra Viva that, so far, the promise of the war crimes tribunal for the former Yugoslavia has not been realised because key indicted suspects are still at large. "The tribunal hasn't really succeeded in bringing to justice the highest political officials in the region responsible for genocide," Sacirbey argued.

"I'm not sure that the ICC would serve a useful deterrent function if it simply tries the lower-level suspects, and (tries) the highest-level suspects only when they are dead or out of power, like Pol Pot," he added.

In Bosnia's case, the UN ambassador has insisted for years that nations have proof that regional leaders were complicit in the atrocities in the Bosnian war, in which more than 200,000 people are estimated to have been killed.

Yet many of those leaders have been thought useful in future peace negotiations, and countries have been unwilling to turn in evidence against them, Sacirbey said.

The Bosnian government has particularly accused Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic of orchestrating the war effort in Bosnia-Hercegovina, but other governments - including the United States - have relied on Milosevic as a diplomatic counterweight to extremist nationalist forces in Serbia.

Sacirbey contended that what he claims is the "selective" gathering of data by some nations could also pose a potential problem for the ICC. "At least some UN Security Council members might not be state parties" to the statute that is to create the Court, Sacirbey said. "Some states that may have the greatest capacity to obtain evidence through intelligence-gathering facilities might therefore not be parties."

Nor is that the only problem the ICC could inherit from the Bosnia tribunal. The current ICC conference at Rome, which has debated whether to include aggression as one of the crimes the Court might prosecute, shows the complexity of the debate over how aggression is defined, Sacirbey said.

"There is a much broader definition of aggression that applies now than the one that appears might be codified in the statute," the ambassador argued.

"We cannnot support the idea of a very narrow definition of aggression, so that it only applies to a situation analogous to the Nazi invasion of Poland."

In modern times, he argued, more savvy leaders have been able to foment aggression in neighbouring countries without resorting to obvious invasions.

The Bosnia war is a case in point, he said, with the fledgling republic attacked by soldiers who belonged to or were paid by foreign countries - such as Gen Ratko Mladic, a paid soldier of the Yugoslav National Army - but who would claim to be members of Bosnian armed forces, thereby transforming the fighting from an external to an internal conflict.

Nor does Bosnia accept the idea that it must fall to the UN Security Council to define what constitutes aggression. "It's clear that the debate in the Security Council on issues of aggression and genocide is politically divisive," Sacirbey said, noting that at times the Council has opted instead to use similar, but less legally suggestive, phrases like "acts of aggression" to depict the same crimes.

"Will we end up with a situation...that aggression is so narrowly defined that a charge could never be brought against a standing leader?" he asked.

"If the ICC or its prosecutor are made subject to the control of political bodies, whether the Security Council or state parties, it will have no credibility and international justice will be seriously compromised," added Justice Richard Goldstone, the former prosecutor for both the former Yugoslav and Rwandan tribunals.

Goldstone argued at the conference underway here that the ICC in some respects faces even stronger challenges than the tribunals, which were created by the Security Council and are enforced under the powerful Chapter Seven of the UN Charter, encountered. "Clearly a war crimes tribunal acting under Chapter Seven is in the best, most advantageous position," he said.

Referring to the lack of arrests of such key Bosnian Serb suspects as Mladic and political leader Radovan Karadzic, Goldstone added: "If arrests aren't being carried out (in those cases) ... what hope is there for a treaty-based ICC (to do better)?" Goldstone doubted that the ICC will have any standing police force empowered to make arrests, as the Bosnia tribunal has in effect had with the intermittent cooperation by NATO forces.

"The tribunals would seem to have a significantly greater theoretical authority than the ICC, especially as it relates to the duty of nations to cooperate," Sacirbey conceded. Yet for all that, the tribunals have not deterred further war crimes in either the former Yugoslavia or in Central Africa's Great Lakes region.

As the Bosnian ambassador noted, UN armoured personnel carriers that were seized during the 1995 Bosnian Serb invasion of Srebrenica - in which some 7,000 Muslim civilians were believed to have been killed - have surfaced in the Yugoslav province of Kosovo where, he argued, they have been used to commit "further acts of ethnic cleansing".

Yet despite that, he said, Yugoslav leaders have never been indicted by any tribunal, and remain undeterred in their acts. Farhan Haq/IPS