Case Closed: A Prosecutor Without Borders Julie Flint and Alex de Waal Eleven years ago, celebrating the creation of the world’s first permanent International Criminal Court, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan spoke of “a gift of hope to future generations, and a giant step forward in the march towards universal human rights and the rule of law.” Reflecting on the birth of the United Nations amidst the struggle against genocide, war crimes, and aggression half a century earlier, Annan noted how the idea of a world criminal court had been stillborn, strangled by the superpower rivalry of the Cold War. Only with the triumph of Western liberalism, and the horrors in former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, had this changed. The International Criminal Court (ICC), Annan said, “is an achievement which, only a few years ago, nobody would have thought possible.”