Gerald Warner - Karadzic is a comic opera star in a kangaroo court

'I HAVE an invisible adviser, but I have decided to represent myself." Oh, no.

It is another Balkan end-of-the-pier show. For this performance, due to the indisposition of Slobodan Milosevic, his part will be taken by Radovan Karadzic. It is like Geraldine McEwan replacing Joan Hickson as Miss Marple. The five-year run of the Slobodan Milosevic Show is now followed by another Serbian comic singer – and this time he has an imaginary friend.

The black comedy that is the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) is beginning another run and it is evident that the high standard of farce established by its previous productions is being maintained. Claiming his life was at risk from American enemies, Karadzic told the 'court' with paranoid self-dramatisation: "It is a matter of life and death. If Mr Holbrooke still wants my death… I wonder if his arm is long enough to reach here." ("Infamy, infamy…")

Karadzic insists US assistant secretary of state Richard Holbrooke promised him immunity from prosecution if he retired from the scene. "I must not only withdraw from public but from party offices and completely disappear from the public arena, not give interviews and not even publish literary works..." Now there is a drastic sanction. Imagine the deprivation of going into Waterstone's and asking for the latest Radovan Karadzic, only to be told he had laid down his pen.

The tribunal at The Hague has no more right to try anybody than the committee of Burnbank Bowling Club. The ICTY is an organ of the United Nations – itself the largest criminal enterprise on the planet. Since legal jurisdiction is a function of sovereignty and there is no international sovereignty, the tribunal is a sham. Over 2004 and 2005 it cost $271m.

It was not even established by the UN General Assembly, but by the Security Council, including Russia and China, whose Communist Party has slaughtered 65 million people – a historic record for mass murder. By what conceivable perversion of ethics could such a state be considered to possess the moral authority to try war criminals? Yet a Chinese judge sits on the tribunal, as do others from such iconic democracies as Pakistan and the Congo.

Besides its cut-and-paste jurisprudence, the tribunal is believed to have paid large sums to indictees to surrender themselves and provide its proceedings with star players. The most notorious instance was the Serbian general Nebojsa Pavkovic, believed to have been paid a generous sum to surrender and who became a father at the age of 59, following a conjugal visit to his luxurious prison. As a tribunal spokesman disarmingly admitted: "You offer attractive packages and you make the alternative not very attractive." Nuremberg this is not.

Even under its own constitution the United Nations has no right to set up this kangaroo court. It was established by authority of Chapter VII of the UN Charter, which states that "the Security Council can take measures to maintain or restore international peace and security". That authorises the formation of peace-keeping forces, but not courts of law, of which it makes no mention. Maintaining the charade, former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan said, on a visit to the tribunal in 1997: "In an interdependent world, the Rule of Law must prevail."

So, how about starting in the UN's own back yard? Soldiers of the UN peacekeeping force in Sierra Leone were accused by Human Rights Watch of systematic rape. Peacekeepers and UN relief agencies' staff have similarly been accused of sexual abuse of refugee children in Liberia and Guinea. Then there was the oil-for-food scandal in Iraq, in which Kofi Annan's son was involved, when $21bn was embezzled.

Most egregious of all, was the UN role in Srebrenica, where Karadzic is accused of perpetrating the notorious massacre, during which 600 Dutch troops of the UN peacekeeping force stood by and did nothing. Yet today the United Nations, whose soldiers permitted the massacre, is putting its perpetrator on trial in the very country to which those troops belonged. Could you make it up?

This comic opera tribunal, along with its Rwandan equivalent and the International Criminal Court, is an erosion of national sovereignty. Sovereign states should try their own criminals. If Serbia truly is a reformed, free nation with credentials to apply for admission to international bodies, then it should be capable of putting its war criminals on trial with due process.

It is a perversion of justice to let Serbia off the hook by featuring Karadzic in a pantomime at the Hague. "I have an invisible adviser"… This one will run and run.