Corralling an Outlaw : Security Council move against Libya: most welcome precedent

As the post-Cold War era advances, the U.N. Security Council is commendably taking advantage of new opportunities to meet the role the U.N. Charter assigned it nearly half a century ago: to have “primary responsibility for the maintenance of international peace and security.” This week’s unanimous council vote calling on Libya to extradite two suspects in the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, can rightly be seen as the latest sign of growing international interest in upholding the rule of law.

Last November, after three years of painstaking detective work, Britain and the United States indicted two Libyan intelligence agents in connection with the bombing, which killed 270 people. Col. Moammar Kadafi’s regime of course denied the accusation, as well as one leveled by a French court after a similar attack on a French airliner over Niger nine months later. Since then Libya has pursued several dodges to evade demands that the suspects be turned over for trial, disingenuously offering to try the accused before Libyan courts--hardly models of impartiality--or to turn them over to the World Court or some other international body for judgment. In fact, no international tribunal exists that has jurisdiction over criminal acts.

Primary jurisdiction is with the countries most victimized by the Lockerbie outrage, the United States and Britain. The Security Council has recognized this by calling on Libya to effectively respond to the extradition demands. And if it refuses? The next move would almost surely be U.N.-mandated action to impose civil aviation sanctions, denying Libya foreign landing rights and prohibiting sales to it of aircraft and spare parts. That wouldn’t necessarily be the last step, but it would be a vital one in underscoring the new international consensus that terrorism is intolerable and must and will be punished.