Gaddafi to The Hague

The fall of a tyrant is usually the cause of popular rejoicing followed by public vengeance. This is the fate the rebels obviously want for Colonel Gaddafi – hence their £1m bounty on his head and offer of a pardon for his killer. But it is just possible, should he be taken alive, that we will enter a new and better era in which tyrants will instead be dispatched to The Hague for fair trial in an international court for their crimes against humanity.

David Cameron has made one serious mistake – parroted repeatedly by the international development secretary, Andrew Mitchell – by insisting that the fate of the Gaddafis should be a matter for the Libyan people. This was the line George Bush took after the capture of Saddam Hussein, as a rhetorical cover for his determination that the death penaltybe imposed on the Iraqi despot by politically manipulated local judges.

It is too much to expect that Gaddafican receive justice at the hands of those whom he has repressed for so long, in a corrupt judicial system that he controlled (and so could not be considered "judicial" in any real sense). It must now be reconstructed from scratch, with new judges independent of the National Transitional Council. That gimcrack organisation's UN spokesman said that it wants to organise Gaddafi's trial, but it is plainly unable to secure an unbiased legal process when he does fall into its hands. The bounty on his head seems to confirm the NTC's preference for Gaddafi's summary execution.

There is a more important reason of principle why the fate of the Gaddafismust not be left to the Libyans. The colonel is charged with crimes against humanity – the mass murder of civilians by perpetrating offences so barbaric that the very fact that a fellow human being can commit them demeans us all. Ordering the massacre of 1,200 captives in a prison compound, blowing 270 people out of the sky over Lockerbie, and almost as many in a UTA passenger jet over Chad a few months later – these are merely the most egregious examples of international crimes committed by the worst man left in the world. It is essential, therefore, that Gaddafi face real justice in The Hague and not revenge in Benghazi.

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