It is an indication of just how seriously the world now takes the brutality of Nepal's conflict that someone like Louise Arbour was here this week.

The former Canadian supreme court justice is a name associated with genocides in Rwanda and ex-Yugoslavia. She specialises in bringing war criminals to justice through international tribunals like she did the massacre perpetrators from Rwanda as well as Yugoslav president, Slobodan Milosevic.

Her presence in Nepal should have sent a chill down the spine of every commander and political or rebel leader under whose watch human rights atrocities are being committed. More than 12,000 Nepalis have lost their lives in the last nine years: most of them are unarmed civilians, butchered, disappeared, killed after arbitrary arrests and torture.

This week in Kathmandu, Arbour was outspoken in her criticism of state security and the Maoists and warned them that they would be held to account. "In every part of the world, political and military leaders who thought themselves immune from persecution are now answering before the law for the gross human rights abuses they perpetrated," Arbour said.

Nepal has signed more than a dozen international treaties and instruments that would allow the UN to get Nepali human rights violators into international courts. "They are more than enough for the UN Security Council to set up tribunals for Nepali perpetrators," Sher Bahadur KC of the Nepal Bar Association and international lawyer told us, "and Arbour was here to assess the human rights situation under that UN provision."

Arbour met King Gyanendra, Prime Minister Deuba, COAS Pyar Jung Thapa conveying her concern that there have been very few serious investigations and convictions of human rights abuses. The army was also given the message that human rights violations at home would affect the future of its UN peacekeeping operations abroad.

Arbour also met human rights activists and relatives of the disappeared. But her harshest words were for the Maoists who she warned shouldn't think they exist in a legal vacuum. She told us: "I would like to warn the leaders of the insurgency not to misread developments in the wider world nor to believe that they can operate outside of the law." She said she was most concerned about the abductions of children, forced displacement of families, murders and extortion by the rebels. But even while Arbour was still in Nepal, Maoists went ahead with the abduction of 500 students and teachers in Dadeldhura and 750 in Sankhuwasabha for their indoctrination programs.

A UN team on involuntary disappearances was in Nepal last month and is scheduled to present its report in the run-up to a hearing on Nepal scheduled for March. Arbour's office in Geneva will be looking at
progress till then.