The judgment by the International Court of Justice that Serbia did not commit genocide during the Bosnian war of 1992-95 was received with great solemnity by Boris Tadic, Serbia’s President. The country’s failure in the court’s eyes to prevent genocide was “extremely serious”, he said. The consequences should it now fail to surrender its most senior alleged war criminals for trial would be “dramatic”, he cautioned. Parliament should pass a resolution condemning unreservedly the atrocities committed in Srebrenica in 1995, he urged. And well he might. For these remarks, while no doubt sincere, were those of someone who had just been handed a crushing legal victory and was trying not to crow.

Taken at face value, yesterday’s verdict acquitted the state of Serbia of committing, conspiring to commit or inciting genocide, while ordering Belgrade to hand over Ratko Mladic andRa-dovan Karadzic to a separate UN court, the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTFY). In reality the judgment was a long-awaited acknowledgement of the severe limits to the investigative powers and authority of any international court — with an implicit offer of a bargain attached. Under the terms of that bargain, in return for its acquittal as a country, Serbia would finally summon the will to face down its hardline nationalists and demand the surrender of Messrs Mladic and Karadzic. With luck and patience, a more familiar form of individual justice might ensue.

The case brought by Bosnia-Herzegovina at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) was the first in history in which one state has accused another of genocide. It was also the first genocide case of any kind heard by the ICJ, which is more used to arbitrating, at glacial speed, in long-run-ning disputes over borders, sovereignty and the finer points of international law.

Not without reason, Belgrade disputed the court’s jurisdiction from the outset. The ICJ’s charter restricts it to hearing cases between UN member states, and Yugoslavia’s membership was suspended in 1992, the year before Bosnia first sought to have the charges heard. Ultimately, the court was forced to assert jurisdiction, since it could not prove it. A decade of hearings and deliberations has followed. They have not been entirely pointless; at the very least they have given the families of Srebrenica’s 7,000 victims an international forum in which to air their grief and state their case. But the notion that true justice can be found in an international court whose jurisdiction is only recognised by one party to the case, and which has no means of enforcing a guilty verdict, is fanciful. To drive home the point, the prime minister of Bosnia’s Serb enclave had given warning that he would neither accept such a verdict, nor enforce it.

Many thousands of Muslims died as a result of Belgrade’s efforts to carve a Greater Serbia out of the former Yugoslavia. The renewed anguish of survivors of the Srebrenica massacres at yesterday’s verdict is understandable, and it remains to be seen whether the current generation of Serbian schoolchildren will ever be forced to confront properly their history. But the broader lesson of history, and of Nuremberg in particular, is that in the prosecution of war crimes international law is never more than a guide for judicious improvisation. And it is best used against individuals, not states. The real message of this verdict for those individuals still sought in connection with the Balkan tragedy is: your time is up.