The ICC has hit the news again today because its prosecutor, Luis Moreno-Ocampo, has issued an indictment against Omar al-Bashir, the President of Sudan, for his involvement in the atrocities in Darfur.

Involving the ICC in major conflicts around the globe can be far from straightforward – and in this case, the international community faces an extremely difficult dilemma, in judging whether everyone’s objective of ending the conflict and helping those who had had their lives devastated by it, is best achieved by involving the ICC, or whether that would do more harm than good by endangering ongoing peace negotiations among the parties there (some discussion of this is on the BBC here). This is a very similar dilemma to that which the international community faced a few years ago in deciding whether or not to refer Sudanese involvement in the conflict between the Lord’s Resistance Army (with bases in Sudan) and Uganda.

I’m not close enough to negotiations on these issues to make an informed judgement on this precarious balance. Certainly it would be a very difficult call to make potentially to endanger promising peace negotiations by involving the international court.

But generally I strongly believe that we should be supporting the cause of criminals around the world who are not subject to effective legal sanction in their own country, being brought before the International Criminal Court. Some of these will be formally private individuals, but some will be in government – for although Omar al-Bashir is the first serving head of state to be indicted by the ICC, the court is part of the same family of international criminal tribunals on specific countries which brought to justice figures such as Yugoslavia’s Slobadan Milosevic.

The idea that people guilty of such major crimes, who are not ever going to come before a court in their own country, should therefore be brought to justice at international level, is a really major step forward.

Historically, this simply wasn’t possible: international relations theory and practice had absolute respect for a state’s power to do anything it wanted, even if that involved its government murdering large portions of its own population. The international community simply could not intervene – at least beyond making its wishes known.

But one of the benefits that the end of the cold war has brought has been the slow decline of that view. The international community has increasingly recognised that we do have obligations to the individual people and populations of catastrophically mismanaged countries and – at least as importantly – it has found practical ways of intervening in ways which are legitimate and are near-universally perceived as based on objective legal views rather than political judgements.

The International Criminal Court (ICC) has been at the forefront of this movement. It takes the basic fundamental principle of the rule of law – which we all recognise and depend on in our daily lives in our own countries, so much that we don’t even notice it – on to the international level, for the first time, in many areas. For the first time, for example, it recognises that the law at an international level should act to protect the human rights of vulnerable people and individuals, and not just states.

It is crucial that the ICC succeeds in establishing this rule of law at the international level – all the more so because of the way in which Bush and Blair’s adventure in Iraq has made it, at least for the moment, much more difficult to take the direct military action which is sometimes necessary to protect vulnerable groups of people against their own governments.

Its establishment was by no means inevitable, and was a major achievement for which its creators were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. It does not intervene in any issues which are remotely routine - being limited only to the most severe and appalling breaches of human rights, usually by governments or other large military organisations.

I fundamentally do believe that we do have obligations to our fellow citizens, which cannot be simply be ignored because their government wishes to over-ride them. The creation of the ICC by the global community is a huge step forward in bringing criminals to court, and we should have a very strong presumption that those widely believed to be guilty of the gravest crimes against humanity - even if, indeed especially if, they are in powerful positions such as in government - should be brought before it.