It was a step forward to charge Pinochet with terrorism, and to acknowledge that the essence of the crime is the use of political violence to induce great fear in society and against those who are innocent, and not just such violence that is directed against the state by opposition groups.

I once got a call from a bank, asking me to compute a mortgage, since their computers were down. This was a very depressing moment.

Our sense of the free market is variable, shifting from a more welfare-oriented model after the Great Depression to a capital-driven market after the collapse of socialism as a viable alternative.

This issue of expanding the reach of international criminal law by reliance on the use of Universal Jurisdiction by domestic courts needs to be balanced against the injustice of according impunity to those with strong geopolitical backing. It is notable that several western European countries backtracked on UJ after threats of retaliatory moves by the United States and Israel. There is no doubt that the domain of UJ is a geopolitical battleground.

The systemic incompatibility between free-market capitalism and the quality of democratic life and respect for human rights has to be modified to take account of such contextual variables as wartime, security threats, and the societal balance between entrepreneurial and working classes.

Human rights and international criminal law both illustrate the contradictory potential of international law. On one level, the imposition of human rights norms is a restraint on interventionary diplomacy, especially if coupled with respect for the legal norm of self-determination. But on another level, the protection of human rights creates a pretext for intervention as given approval by the UN Security Council in the form of the R2P (responsibility to protect) norm, as used in the 2011 Libyan intervention. The same applies with international criminal accountability.

There was a deliberate decision after the failure of the League of Nations to make the next attempt to establish a global political actor sensitive to geopolitical realities. The underlying idea was to provide major states, defined in 1945 by reference to the winners in the Second World War (now an anachronism), with assurance that they could take part in the UN without jeopardising their national interests. In this regard, the UN has succeeded, as none of the big countries has withdrawn, and the Organisation has managed to achieve virtually universal membership of all sovereign states.