Sir, – Ratko Mladic’s death closes the book on one of the worst mass murders Europe had seen since the Holocaust during the second World War. He died at 84 in UN detention at The Hague after being convicted of genocide for the 1995 massacre of at least 8,000 Muslim prisoners in Srebrenica inside the UN-designated “safe area” of Bosnia, during the Balkans war of the early 1990sMladic, the “Butcher of Bosnia” was serving a life sentence. He had been tried and convicted at the ad-hoc tribunal for the former state of Yugoslavia, created only after these crimes. Every single person named on the indictment of this tribunal was arrested, and tried in The Hague. His death in custody shows why the permanent International Criminal Court that superseded this tribunal should be retained and even strengthened. The International Criminal Court should be retained in the face of the exhortations of US president Donald Trump and his secretary of state Marco Rubio to sanction and even abolish it.The need for a permanent court remains in the world as long as warlords and rogue states continue to kill civilians with impunity. It shows justice is possible, even when people such as Mladic, and his political partner in crime, Radovan Karadzic, evade capture for years. It deters those with genocidal urges by showing that rank or position offers no immunity, and it gives victims a court of last resort when domestic systems fail, ignore or even glorify perpetrators. Without such a court like this, the next Mladic will go unpunished and free, not dying in custody as a convicted war criminal. – Yours, etc,LEO E SHARKEY,Bratislava,Slovakia