COLUMN LEFT/ JONATHAN POWER : Give the U.N. Power to Try Individuals : The organization lacks judicial teeth. A world criminal court would remedy that.

The Arab countries, united for once, are muttering darkly that the U.N. Security Council has become a tool of the West.

This is ironic. The time for honest grumbling would have been when the Security Council, 16 months ago, gave the United States carte blanche to go to war with Iraq. That was not, on my reading of the U.N. Charter, how the United Nations is supposed to work. But today, the Security Council, in ordering Libya to hand over suspects in the bombing of the Pan American airliner over Lockerbie, Scotland, is working by the book.

Indeed, Iraq apart, the end of the Cold War appears to have freed the United Nations to do what it was established for--to prevent war and keep the peace. Whether it be Yugoslavia, Cambodia, El Salvador, Angola, Armenia and Azerbaijan and now Lockerbie, it seems to be working, most of the time, harmoniously and productively.

Yet if critics of the American-British-French-engineered U.N. confrontation with Libya were serious about the deficiencies of the Security Council, they would make the valid point that the trouble with the United Nations is that it suffers from an insufficiency of judicial teeth. The United Nations can sit on its hands or it can call for a blockade and even order a war. Between these two extremes, there is too big a void.

The World Court fills a part of the hole, but not enough. Libya should be able to have the choice of offering up the Lockerbie suspects to a World Criminal Court. At the moment, somewhat paradoxically, Libya as a sovereign state can go to the World Court, as it did last month, and argue its right not to surrender the men to U.S. or British courts. But it cannot suggest an acceptable alternative, since only states, not individuals, can appear before the court.

So we are left with the Security Council moving toward imposing sanctions and Libya floundering around.

A world criminal court is long overdue and, contrary to common belief, would not be insuperably difficult to create. The existing World Court with its 15 judges, nominated for nine-year terms by the Security Council, has done sterling work, adjudicating a wide range of cases, from international financial claims to seabed disputes to deciding who is the rightful ruler of Namibia.

To extend its writ to include criminal cases involving individuals could be done by the simple expedient of amending its statute. This would require a two-thirds majority vote in the U.N. General Assembly; in all likelihood, given the significance of the Lockerbie case, an effort today would stand a chance of success. A case like Lockerbie would enable a new-look court to cut its teeth. So would a prosecution of Saddam Hussein for war crimes, a much wiser way of bringing more pressure on Iraq than threatening to bomb it again with the real risk that the innocent will suffer more than the guilty.

Interestingly, when the Genocide Convention was first mooted in 1947 in the wake of the Holocaust, the original proposal suggested an international penal court to try crimes of genocide, modeled on the Nuremberg court that convicted the Nazi leaders. But by 1989, when the United States finally got around to ratifying the convention, thus giving it the recognition it needed, the provision was long dead and buried.

This did not stop a group of survivors of the Khmer Rouge massacres, in which more than a million Cambodians died, from attempting to breathe life into the convention by seeking to persuade governments to bring the Khmer Rouge case before the World Court.

Sadly, no country was willing to take the initiative. It was argued that the World Court did not have jurisdiction, or that it was more important to persuade the Khmer Rouge to join peace negotiations. Yet if there had been a standing world criminal court that regularly dealt with such charged cases, it would have been much more difficult for responsible governments to ignore its existence. To be credible for the cases they would want to use it for, they’d have to accept the bringing of cases perhaps not to their taste or to their sense of Realpolitik.

A world criminal court will not stop all torture, massacres or terrorism, any more than today it could bring back to life the dead on Pan Am 103. But it would be another marker for mankind, a line which, if crossed, offers the chance of justice and retribution. Over time, as its work evolved and earned respect, it would enable the world to become a little more civilized and rather more prepared to have recourse to law, not the bludgeon or the bullet.