I’VE just returned from Iraq. As readers of this column last week will know, I’ve recently spent time talking to survivors of some of the worst atrocities ever committed in wartime. I am of course referring to those carried out by the brutal cadres of the Islamic State (IS) group in the Iraqi city of Mosul.

Arriving home it was curious to find the news headlining with the conviction of former Bosnian Serb commander Ratko Mladic.

Sadly, I’m also all too familiar with Mladic’s grisly handiwork. Not only did I spend time in Sarajevo when his own vicious henchmen laid siege to that city, but I also visited the town of Srebrenica, where they massacred more than 8,000 Bosnian Muslims in the 1990s Bosnian war. It was the worst atrocity on European soil since the Second World War.

READ MORE: Butcher of Bosnia guilty of genocide

As news of Mladic’s conviction for genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity came through on Wednesday, I couldn’t help thinking of those Bosnians I’ve met who suffered appallingly at his hands.

People like Kada Hotic, who remembers those dark days in 1995 when her husband, two brothers and son Samir were rounded up and killed at Srebrenica.

“I know that Samir, along with other boys, was tied up and probably kept waiting a long time to be killed,” Kada told me a few years ago. “It was a very hot day, so hot that some of the Serb soldiers couldn’t keep up with the pace of the shooting,” she recalled at the Potocari Memorial Cemetery in Srebrenica, as we stood among the thousands of white headstones, four of which belong to the men of her family.

If Kada suffered at the hands of Mladic in Srebrenica, then my old friend and colleague Hamza Baksic was on the receiving end of the Butcher of Bosnia’s siege of Sarajevo.

Before the war, Hamza had been a celebrated journalist with the city’s famous Oslobodjenje newspaper. A strapping man, well over six feet tall, he possessed an incredible intellect and wonderful writing talent.

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Though he survived the entire siege, it was not before withering to a shadow of his former self after being forced to live on a diet of grass soup when food supplies had all but run out in the city.

Let’s not forget that what both these people and countless others like them endured and witnessed happened right here in Europe barely a few decades ago.

Sarajevo’s snipers’ alley, its infamous marketplace and cemetery massacres and the ethnic cleansing and war crimes that swept across Bosnia and elsewhere in the former Yugoslavia, might seem like events of the past, but look around the world right now and there is a disquieting sense of deja vu.

From Syria to the Central African Republic, Iraq to Yemen, Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) to Myanmar, war crimes and crimes against humanity prevail.

Mladic’s conviction in The Hague this week was of course the result of long and detailed investigative work undertaken by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY).

The creation of the ICTY along with another temporary court in response to atrocities committed in Rwanda during the 1990s was the first war crimes court set up by the UN and the first international tribunal established since the Nuremberg trials went after those behind the horrors of the Nazi regime.

READ MORE: Blindfolded victims bussed to killing fields by Butcher of Bosnia - UN forensic team

As it happens, Mladic’s trial is one of the last to be heard by the ICTY, with the court due to be dissolved at the end of this year.

With the tribunal’s demise, attention inevitably will now focus on the work of the International Criminal Court (ICC) in performing the crucial role of ensuring that no leader, rebel group, junta or army can hide from international justice.

To that end the ICC really has its work cut out. Founded under the terms of the Rome Statute in 1998 that entered into force in 2002 with the goal of trying the perpetrators of the world’s worst atrocities, rarely in that time can its role have faced greater challenges than it does today.

From every direction the ICC is under threat. Here in the West there is a growing disdain towards international bodies like the ICC, epitomised by US President Donald Trump’s slashing of funding for the UN. In addition, the ICC also now faces the threat of direct boycotts by a number of its member countries.

Last month the African nation of Burundi became the first to leave the ICC. That its pull-out came as the country came under ever-greater scrutiny amidst mounting evidence of crimes against humanity and “a systematic attack against the civilian population", is perhaps no surprise.

Since Burundi’s move, other regional countries have also threatened to withdraw from the ICC, claiming it is unfairly targeting African nations. Some, though not yet having followed through on their threat, no doubt want to ensure the court’s gaze does not fall on alleged crimes and atrocities in their own backyard.

Almost anywhere you look across a troubled globe right now the need for a body like the ICC– flaws and all – is obvious.

Often it’s not just despotic regimes and tyrants that come under its focus. Over the past few days the ICC prosecutor Fatou Bensouda has requested permission from the court’s judges to authorise an investigation into possible war crimes and crimes against humanity in Afghanistan since 2003.

So far, the prosecutor wants to investigate not just crimes by Afghan government forces, the Taliban, and foreign forces, but also, notably, those allegedly committed by the US military and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

Without fear of favour has to be the only way the ICC operates if it’s to offer victims justice and to act as a serious deterrent. As the trial and conviction of Ratko Mladic revealed, the ICTY set what international lawyers describe as the “gold standard” for the prosecuting and defining of such complex crimes as genocide.

READ MORE: Butcher of Bosnia guilty of genocide

It opened the door too for international criminal accountability and hastening the end of the era of impunity. Despite some shortcomings, the ICTY leaves behind an impressive legacy. The survivors and families of loved ones murdered in Srebrenica found justice of sorts through its efforts this week.

In a world where genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity continued to stalk the lives of so many, the need to hold those accountable is as pressing as it’s ever been.