It was a grim finale. One that quite literally brought the curtain down on a war crimes tribunal the like of which has not been seen since the military court that tried Nazi leaders in Nuremberg after Second World War.

In the courtroom, under the watchful gaze of presiding judge Carmel Agius, stood the figure of Croat General Slobodan Praljak. Just moments earlier the white haired and bearded 72-year-old Praljak had tilted back his head and took a swig from a small bottle as judge Agius read out the verdict in the general’s trial for war crimes.

“I just drank poison,” Praljak exclaimed, having seemingly toasted those deemed his adversaries.

“Slobodan Praljak is not a war criminal. I am rejecting the court ruling,” the general could then be heard saying before a curtain was drawn on the orders of the judge blocking him from view.

Dramatic as Praljak’s suicide by taking potassium cyanide was, however, it did not stop the court from finding him guilty of war crimes in the 1992-95 Bosnian war.

Praljak was one of six ethnic Croats convicted by the Hague tribunal who, prosecutors said, were “key participants in a joint criminal enterprise to ethnically cleanse Bosnian Muslims.”

Just days before Praljak’s suicide and conviction at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), former Bosnian Serb commander Ratko Mladic, nicknamed the ‘butcher of Bosnia’, was also sentenced to life imprisonment after being convicted of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity.

As a reporter who covered the wars in the former Yugoslavia, I’m sadly all too familiar with the grisly handiwork of people like Praljak and Mladic.

Not only did I spend time in Sarajevo when Mladic’s own vicious henchmen laid siege to that city but also visited the town of Srebrenica where in 1995 they massacred more than 8,000 Bosnian Muslims. It was the worst atrocity on European soil since the Second World War.

As events have unfolded at the Tribunal these past days, I couldn’t help thinking of those Bosnians I’ve met that suffered appallingly at the hands of men like Mladic.

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 and probably kept waiting a long time to be killed,” Kada once told me.

“It was a very hot day, so hot that some of the Serb soldiers couldn’t keep up with the pace of the shooting,” Kada recalled a few years ago 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.

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 even a cursory glance around the world right now provokes 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.

Last week the conviction of Praljak and Mladic marked the last dramatic acts in the ICTY’s proceedings that will now see it shut its doors at the end of the year, and with it a chapter of international criminal justice will end. After twenty five years the ICTY’s closure in effect signals the end of a judicial experiment that has reverberated around the world, from the killing fields of Rwanda to the CIA’s secret cells in Europe. In that time the Tribunal has had both its supporters and detractors. The latter complain that the court was slow, expensive and damaged by a number of high-profile acquittals. It was also, they say, plagued by witness intimidation. It's other role was supposedly to help with reconciliation, but revisionism being rife convicted war criminals were often feted as heroes.

The conviction of Praljak is a case in point, with many in his home region of Capljina dismissing the outcome of his trial as an outrageous miscarriage of justice.

Then again Capljina has always been known as a stronghold of Croat nationalism. Such is its reputation that is has given rise to a derogatory joke that goes along the lines that in the rocky hills of western Herzegovina, nothing grows but snakes, stones and Ustasha - the Second World War Croat fascist movement.

Despite the negative views of some in Capljina towards the ICTY, the court is still seen by many people as a positive and groundbreaking development.

“It was something utterly new in terms of international jurisdiction and humanitarian law,” says Wolfgang Schomburg, the first German judge at the ICTY who spoke to German TV last week in the aftermath of Praljak’s conviction.

“The court was supposed to demonstrate that no one was above the law, and that every person would have to answer for their actions, regardless of the position they may have held in politics, the military or any other segment of their country,” explained Schomburg.

In its twenty-five year existence the ICTY questioned more than 4,600 witnesses and collected more than 2.5 million documents. It charged some 161 people with crimes and 151 faced trial. Most of the others either died in custody before they could be brought to justice or had their cases dropped.

Backed by the arrest-power of Western peacekeepers and the readiness of the EU to make any European integration with Yugoslavia’s successor states conditional on their cooperation, the tribunal secured 83 convictions. These included presidents, security service leaders and generals most of whom were given long prison sentences.

“The ICTY allowed many of those victims to address the court, giving them the chance to look perpetrators in the eye for the first time,” says human right activist Nemanja Stjepanovic from the Belgrade-based Humanitarian Law Centre.

Created in answer to the worst war crimes in Europe since the Nazis, the ICTY was set up by the United Nations in 1993 and set a precedent of accountability that has since put the Khmer Rouge and Liberia’s Charles Taylor in the dock and paved the way for a court with global ambition.

But what now though of that ambition and the ICTY’s legacy in light of today’s troubled world? Right now demands for accountability are multiplying, along with avenues to pursue them. For the moment any outstanding and unresolved cases at the ICTY will be handed over to another ad hoc criminal court, the Mechanism for International Criminal Tribunals (MICT). That court is charged with bringing ongoing cases for the former Yugoslavia and for Rwanda to an end. But other courts too have sprung up in the wake of the ICTY.

Experts point to the 2016 conviction in a Senegalese court of Chad ex-dictator, Hissene Habre. His case was the first time universal jurisdiction was used to prosecute the former ruler of one country by a court in another country for human rights crimes. Then there was the very recent case based on the same principle that saw a Syrian soldier convicted by a Swedish court, partly on the basis of social media posts.

Right now between them authorities in Sweden and Germany are each investigating more than a dozen individuals for crimes in Syria and Iraq. Significant as such actions are, human rights activists say the need for a Tribunal or court on the same scale as, and with the clout of, the ICTY, is still sorely needed.

The jurisprudence since set by the ICTY while paving the way for other countries like Senegal, Sweden or Germany to adjudicate similar crimes, also gave rise to the establishment in 2002 of the International Criminal Court (ICC), a permanent body that tries international crimes including war crimes and crimes against humanity. 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 the role of the ICC have faced greater challenges than it does today.

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 now also 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 Burundi’s 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” was perhaps little surprise to many.

Nevertheless Burundi’s mistrust of the ICC is echoed across the African continent. Last year in statement on state television, Gambian Information Minister Sheriff Bojang said the court was clearly designed by Western whites to target African blacks, echoing complaints by South African and Burundian officials that the international justice system focuses its attention solely on cases from Africa.

“The ICC, despite being called International Criminal Court, is in fact an International Caucasian Court for the persecution and humiliation of people of colour, especially Africans,” insisted Bojang.

The ICC faces other opposition too. Late last year Russia announced it was cutting ties with the international tribunal, withdrawing its signature from the founding treaty. The timing of Moscow’s decision came in the wake of a report by the ICC’s lead prosecutor, Fatou Bensouda, that for the first time stated that the conflict in Ukraine amounts to an armed conflict between Russia and Ukraine.

Russian President Vladimir Putin was none too pleased with the ICC’s conclusion that Russia’s annexation of the Ukrainian peninsula Crimea “factually amounts to an on-going state of occupation.”

For its part the UK government too has recently taken action of its own against the ICC, lobbying to block it from activating the war crime of aggression and asking for “greater clarity”. According to some campaigners, it’s a move that could protect Tony Blair and other British politicians from the risk of future prosecution.

One of the leading campaigners for a change in the law regarding the crime of aggression is Don Ferencz, an academic at Oxford University who runs the Global Institute for the Prevention of Aggression. His father was a prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials.

“After a 71-year effort to effectively criminalise aggression, you would think that the nations which sat in judgment in Nuremberg would be pleased to see that it’s finally about to happen, but they are not,” Ferencz said recently in response to the UK position.

For the moment the United States too while itself not a signatory to the ICC is increasing at odds with the court. In a watershed moment, chief prosecutor Fatou Bensouda this month called for a formal investigation into war crimes in Afghanistan, including the mistreatment of detainees by US forces in the country and at CIA ‘dark sites’ in Poland, Romania and Lithuania.

Supporters of the ICC say that this approach - without fear or favour - is the only way the ICC can operate, if it is to offer victims justice and to act as a serious deterrent to human rights abuses and war crimes.

Established by treaty and boycotted by the United States, China and Russia, the ICC has little of the clout of the ICTY. For now the curtain is about to some down on the latter, but in a troubled world the need for its equivalent is as crucial as ever.

With the conviction of Slobodan Praljak a few days ago, Param-Preet Singh, an associate director at Human Rights Watch, eloquently summed up that need.

“What has not ebbed in the last five to seven years, and in fact what has only increased, is the demand for justice, and an expectation that it will translate into action,” he concluded.