At certain critical moments which cause historic precedent, Britain, of all places, sometimes gets it right. That has happened in the case of that odious Chilean butcher, General Augusto Pinochet, who is reportedly on his sick-bed somewhere near London but who preferably should be dangling from a hangman's noose.

A British court has struck a wonderful blow for human rights everywhere with a ruling this month that the ex-dictator should be extradited to Spain, where he is wanted on charges of crimes against humanity. Yes, no less.

This is the Pinochet who stormed to power in 1973 through a bloody coup that spawned one of the harshest dictatorships in the Western hemisphere. A grossly inadequate man (as such men tend to be), he imagined he would secure legitimacy by wiping out any trace of the memory of the predecessor whose murder he had abetted, Salvador Allende. In his two decades in power, military and paramilitary hoodlums controlled by him had a field day with his opponents. Thousands were murdered. Many more "disappeared" without trace. Torture became a uniquely Chilean brand.

One might well ask–why charge Pinochet in Spain, and not in Chile, where the crimes he is wanted for were actually committed? The simple answer is that the specific indictments against him happened to have been filed in Spain, which once upon a time used to run Chile and much of Latin America.

For plainly practical reasons, the charges could hardly have been filed in Chile, where the tyrannical system Pinochet installed has yet to be certified dead, with his followers still holding powerful positions in the government, especially in the Army.

But the larger reason is as uplifting as was the decision by that British court to take up the case and brush aside arguments that it had no jurisdiction over a supposedly Chilean internal affair. By taking up the indictments, Spain was signalling to the world that human rights are universal and that crimes touching on these rights should not be treated as a matter to be confined to nationality and narrow arguments on "sovereignty".

Ronald Bartle, the British judge who has ruled on the extradition demand, by the very act of agreeing to listen to the case, bolstered this very belief in the universality of human rights.

This "sovereignty" argument is old hat. And tiresome. We hear it endlessly, not least here in Kenya. Behind it is the loathsome reasoning that whatever a ruler does within the confines of his country's borders is no business of anybody else's. So you can kill and keep rotting corpses in your house and expect no neighbour will raise a fuss? In the same vein, Idi Amin will play his murderous games in Uganda for as long as he likes. So will the even more obnoxious Pol Pot in Cambodia. And nobody is supposed to raise a finger. Uganda and Cambodia are sovereign states, remember? And so it goes.

Even the manner the Chilean dictator choreographed his way out of office when it became clear his fascist rule was no longer tenable left a bad taste in the mouth. He continues to pollute Chile through cronies whom he installed into key positions throughout the government, the Judiciary and the armed forces. He imposed a Constitution which effectively granted him immunity from any prosecution. And for good measure, he annointed himself Senator for Life.

That is what makes the current demands by his Chilean surrogates that he be released so he can stand trial in Chile rather than in Spain so comically disingenous. Who will dare arrest him on Chilean soil? President Eduardo Frei? Won't that surely be asking for another coup d'etat like has just happened to Nawaz Shariff in Pakistan?

Inspiring as the British ruling was, it is by no means certain that Pinochet will end up getting his just desserts. An appeal is pending, which could just overturn the noble decision by the lower court. And the ex-dictator, who is 83, is said to be ailing. Conceivably, British Home Secretary, Jack Straw, who after the court duels has the final authority to decide whether Pinochet stays or goes, could use that to block extradition. The ex-dictator also has powerful Conservative forces fighting for his corner, led by Margaret Thatcher.

Prior to the latest court ruling, the progress of the Pinochet case through the British judicial system has been one of long-winded fudge. After an initial ruling months ago to extradite the Chilean, an appeal wended up to the House of Lords, Britain's highest appellate authority. Majestically, a panel of Law Lords upheld the ruling. But then confusion set in when Pinochet's camp successfully petitioned that a member of that panel, one Lord Hoffman, had certain links via his wife with Amnesty International, and thus presumably was not an entirely neutral arbiter.

A fresh panel was constituted, which came up with a deliberately muddled decision: Yes, Pinochet was guilty of various human rights offences like torture. But then Britain could not competently rule on them as the specific violations brought to court happened prior to 1988, which is when Britain ratified the 1984 International Convention Against Torture.

The anti-Pinochet litigants were thus forced to go back to the drawing board to draft the present charges, which carefully cover the period of the remainder of Pinochet's rule following Britain's ratification of the torture covenant.

Lovers of liberty everywhere are praying against a repeat of this orchestrated muddle. All their eyes will be focused on the British legal system to see whether it will rise to the occasion and make a landmark statement for human rights which posterity will record. (The late Pol Pot, too, committed his atrocities prior to 1988. So should we expect Britain to wash its hands of all responsibility if the monster was hiding somewhere in that country?)

The defence that Pinochet presided over a remarkable economic turn-around in Chile is far from sufficient. Park Chung Hee, Chun Doo-Hwan, Ro Tae-Woo and other assorted South Korean tyrants who oversaw that country's spectacular transformation from an under-developed economy to a newly-industrialised one will never be cleansed by history because of that. The atrocities they committed will remain in the collective memory of South Koreans forever.

On the opposite end Julius Nyerere will be remembered for generations to come as a great man in spite of the fact that he hardly left his country brimming in riches.

There is a simple, universal moral to all this Pinochet saga. Dictators who like to hide under the cover of "sovereignty" will in future find there is nothing there to hide behind. The world is changing. Atrocities committed in whatever country remain atrocities and will be judged as such the world over.

The Rwandan leaders who masterminded the genocide of more than half a million Tutsis in 1994 are realising that as they get hunted the world over. Soon there will be nowhere to hide.

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It became clear from his remarks on Nyayo Day that President Moi has no intention of honouring the Constitution by leaving office as the law says in the year 2002. And the most distressing part of it are the reasons being given by his cronies like Ministers Andrew Kiptoon and Shariff Nassir why he should not step aside. He must be given time, they say, to get this country going again.

If you are the chief executive of a company which has failed to post a profit in 21 years, being asked to retire should be welcomed as an unprecedented favour. You should consider yourself extremely lucky you were not sacked years ago. To ask for more time to rectify the mess you have created is simply unthinkable.

In any case, how are you going to do that? Where will the magic come from to get right what you could not all those 21 years? And how many more years do you need to rebuild? Twenty-one? Forty? Are we to understand that after you have wrecked the economy, and much else besides, you should be given more time in power to try again? What guarantee is there that you will succeed? Suppose, as is so likely, you willfail again? Where will that leave us, that is if we will still be surviving as a viable entity?

Think of Nyerere. Sound economics was not among his many talents, and he chose to give way rather than inflict grievous damage to his country's economy. Now look at all the tributes going his way.

The sycophants busy pressing Moi not to go are hardly thinking of anything close to such a legacy. They are simply desperate to save their own slimyskins by prolonging the status quo. They will not succeed in their plot.

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