Calling time on tyranny

Fujimori is the latest in a series of former leaders accused of human rights abuses who are finding out they can't escape justice indefinitely.

Chile's extradition of former president Alberto Fujimori back to Peru to stand trial on allegations of death squad killings and corruption shows that the world is becoming a smaller place for people who commit atrocities.

Until recently, if you killed one person, you went to jail, but if you killed thousands, you got a comfortable exile with your bank account in a foreign country. The Nuremberg trials established the legal principle that there should be no immunity for perpetrators of the gravest outrages, no matter who they were or where their crimes were committed. Yet until Britain's arrest of General Augusto Pinochet of Chile in October 1998, on a Spanish warrant, few states had the courage to put these noble principles into practice.