Moving on from the World Cup to other interminable international proceedings during which nothing much happens, yet another war crimes trial got underway today at the Hague.

You may recall that the last one, euphemistically described as “inconclusive” by the New York Times today, was the four-year circus that finally ended a few months back when the defendant, former Serbian strongman Slobodan Milosevic, expired before the trial did.

Today’s – which is being predicted to last at least a year (so God only knows how long it will actually take) – involves six members of Milosevic’s inner circle, indicted for the ethnic cleansing of Kosovo Albanians, up to 9,000 of whom were killed in the campaign that induced about 800,000 of them to flee.

It is interesting to read about a war crimes trial international-law-style against the back-drop of the Supreme Court’s recently torpedoing the Bush administration’s military commissions for the trial of al Qaeda war crimes. The Hamdan Court, for example, complained that the President’s commissions only provided for three-member courts while court-martials under the Uniform Code of Military Justice call for five. Apparently, the six Serbs at the Hague will be tried before a three-judge court, and no one seems to think that is an offense against fundamental fairness.

More interesting though is consideration of what must be proved. Hamdan was charged with conspiracy – specifically, membership in the al Qaeda conspiracy to mass-murder civilians in violation of the laws of war. The Hamdan plurality, however, claimed this violated international law because, according to Justices Stevens, Souter, Ginsburg and Breyer, the crime of conspiracy is not recognized as an offense under the law of war.

Well what do you know: In the war crimes trial begun today, the Times explains that to convict the six defendants, “prosecutors must demonstrate … that Belgrade had a ‘criminal plan’ to permanently expel a large portion of the Kosovo Albanians[.] …[L]awyers familiar with the tribunal proceedings said that prosecutors must prove there was a Serb plan to expel them.” (Emphasis added.)

A conspiracy, of course, is nothing more than a plan to which people agree.

Maybe if the Defense Department had just charged Hamdan with involvement in a plan to mass-murder civilians, instead of a conspiracy to mass-murder civilians, the make-it-up-as-you-go-along standards of international law would have been satisfied.