Human rights experts roundly agree that Augusto Pinochet's 1998 arrest in London has made for a "new moment," a "turning point," "a whole new calculus for transnational justice." Yet the climate remains volatile, marked by unprecedented legal advances as well as dramatic setbacks.

One landmark case embraces both extremes. In February 2000, Chad's former tyrant, Hissein Habre, was arrested in Senegal where, since his ouster, he has been living in exile. A direct consequence of the Pinochet precedent, this was the first time that an African leader was charged with human rights abuses by the court of another African nation. Moreover, the case was brought by victims — survivors of torture, death squads, and terror — who traveled to Dakar in order to testify in court. Hailed by African human rights groups as "the most important [court] case in Senegal's history," the arrest was later overturned by another court, and the judges involved in the earlier decision were fired.

In August 2000, two Argentine "Dirty Warriors" were arrested while traveling abroad. Ricardo Miguel Cavallo was detained in Mexico on August 24 after Baltasar Garzon, the same Spanish judge who initiated the prosecution of Pinochet, issued an extradition request on charges of torture, murder, and participation in genocide. The former naval officer was known as "Serpico" (for his resemblance to Al Pacino) when he worked at the Navy Mechanics School--often called the "Argentine Auschwitz" or the "Harvard of Death" — where he was famous both for executing and teaching the art of torture. France too has called for Cavallo's extradition, in connection with the torture and deaths in the Navy Mechanics School of fifteen French nationals, including two nuns, Alice Domon and Leonie Duquet. Mexico is expected to comply with these requests for extradition, a process that should take about eighteen months.

The Italian arrest of Jorge Olivera, a retired Argentine army major, soon became a bizarre legal theatrical. Detained in Rome on August 6 on a French extradition request for the torture and forced disappearance of a French citizen in Argentina in 1976, Olivera was released on September 18 on the basis of a highly suspicious document, soon found to be have been faked by Olivera and his associates. In order to circumvent the fact that cases of forced disappearance have no statute of limitation in international human rights law, Olivera (who is also a lawyer) presented a supposed death certificate for Marie Anne Erize, the French woman he is accused of kidnapping and torturing, and whose body has never been found. By the time the document was proven to be false, Olivera had been flown back to Argentina, where he has legal immunity for atrocities committed during the dictatorship. In Italy, the two judges who released him are under investigation. In the Buenos Aires suburb where he lives, Olivera was officially declared Persona Non Grata; human rights and citizens groups have spray-painted Asesino! Torturador! on the front of his house. Human rights groups are studying ways to bring this miscarriage of justice to an international tribunal.

How best to confront such dynamism has become a heated legal, moral, and political issue. The experts consulted for this article disagree, sometimes starkly, on optics, emphases, and preferred courses of action.

Only when asked to compile a working list of former heads of state vulnerable to international arrest in the wake of the Pinochet precedent, did our experts widely concur. For most of the respondents, the magnitude and scale of atrocities were decisive factors in their selections: