It was a case of "splitting the baby in half", to use American jargon for situations when judges try to satisfy both sides in a lawsuit. The International Court of Justice (ICJ) recently acquitted Serbia on a charge of genocide committed during the 1992-1995 war in Bosnia, but neither party was entirely happy with the outcome. Was it the right decision? And what's it got to with Darfur?

"Of all the possible judgments available to the International Court of Justice, the one it delivered yesterday is the most likely to encourage peace between Bosnia and Serbia," is the verdict from Bronwen Maddox in Britain's Times. But it's out on a limb, one of very few newspapers which conclude the court's verdict was a "sane and useful ruling".

Erna Paris, author of forthcoming book, "Diogenes' Lantern: Justice in the Age of the American Empire", agrees the verdict will certainly be a step towards reconciliation in the region . This way, Serb nationalists won't be able to claim that the West holds Serbs collectively responsible for genocide, an argument that has helped them maintain their popularity, she writes in Canada's Globe and Mail.

Britain's Economist magazine could hardly disagree more. It is "highly doubtful" that such a verdict could promote reconciliation among the countries of former Yugoslavia , it says. In fact, it concludes: " (No) verdict that the ICJ could have delivered would prompt the differing parties to change their perceptions of recent history."

Ljiljana Smajlovic, editor of Serbia's daily Politika, is also unenthusiastic about the prospects for reconciliation. Bosnia will use the verdict "as an excellent basis to radically undermine" the existence of the Serb part of the Bosnian entity. "In that sense", she concludes, "the verdict of the International Court of Justice in The Hague will not resolve the disagreements (of) the two sides."

Among those that feel that the ICJ got it completely wrong is top international lawyer Antonio Cassese, the first president of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY). "(The judgment) should be greeted with considerable ambivalence," he says, writing in Lebanon's Daily Star. The court set an "unrealistically high standard of proof" in order to legally prove that Serbia committed genocide, in Cassese's opinion. The court demanded proof of specific instructions from Belgrade for committing genocide against the Muslim population of Bosnia and, predictably, it was impossible to find. According to the former ICTY president, it should have been enough to prove that the Bosnian Serb military leadership was financed by Serbia.

Martin Shaw, professor of International Relations and Politics at Britain's University of Sussex, goes even further and suggests that the court itself "has engaged in systematic denial of the Bosnian genocide" by delivering its verdict. Commenting on the judgement on opendemocracy.net, he concedes that a different verdict would have made problems in Serbia even worse, but thinks that's not a good enough reason for denying justice.

And then there are mutterings about the victors always having too much control over justice.

For example, we get a Russian perspective from RIA Novosti, a Russian news and information agency, which wonders why international law is only "clawing at Serbia", but leaving alone the countries that bombed innocent civilians in during the 1999 military campaign against what was then Yugoslavia .

"The ruling... punctures a decade-and-a-half of lies in support of the doctrine of military and judicial interventionism," says John Laughland, author of "Travesty: the Trial of Slobodan Milosevic and the Corruption of International Justice", in Britain's Guardian. The United States and its allies bombed Kosovo in 1999 partly because they felt they should have intervened more forcefully against Serbia in Bosnia. Now that it turns out Serbia was not in control in Bosnia after all, their decision to intervene militarily in Kosovo stands on somewhat shaky grounds.

Whoever thinks that an international court - with no means of enforcing a guilty verdict - can deliver justice is wrong, says Britain's Times. What the verdict has done is to pave the way for the possibility of individual justice: now that Serbia has been acquitted as a state, it should hand over Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic, both accused of committing crimes during the Bosnian war, the Times argues.

Proving genocide in a court of law seems to be an elusive business, David Kaye, former legal adviser to the U.S. embassy in The Hague, comments in the LA Times.

Which is precisely why it was a "smart choice" for Luis Moreno-Ocampo, chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, to prosecute a Sudanese government official and a Janjaweed militia commander for war crimes and crimes against humanity in Darfur, rather than genocide. He got the message that it's better to prosecute on provable grounds than "try to make a symbolic statement about genocide", Kaye says.

The verdict establishes another important precedent for the future of prosecuting crimes in Darfur, says the Guardian: Sudan has an obligation to stop genocide taking place in Darfur, even if it claims that it is not perpetrating the crimes itself.

But how much control does Sudan really have over the Janjaweed, wonders the Ottawa Citizen. It agrees with the LA Times that it's more feasible to try individuals, and welcomes Moreno-Ocampo's indictments. But the paper insists that "the wilful blindness" of states must stop.

The fairness of the ICJ's verdict will undoubtedly be debated for days to come in the newsrooms of former Yugoslav countries, but Bg anon, a blogger on Bosnia Vault website, points out that the day of the verdict "should (have been) spent thinking about the victims of that pointless war and not on a sense of vindication or crippling disappointment".

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