The Justice Department's directive, involving a process known as deferred prosecutions, signaled "an important step away from the more aggressive prosecutorial practices seen in some cases under their predecessors," Sullivan & Cromwell, a prominent Wall Street law firm, told clients in a memo that September.
Meanwhile, the director of public prosecutions has signalled that the convictions of dozens more environmental campaigners could prove unsafe because a senior prosecutor may not have disclosed the truth about Mark Kennedy, the undercover cop who spied on political groups he had infiltrated as a member.
The prosecution, he said, signaled that Los Angeles would no longer tolerate the violations.
Although that is a matter for the judges to decide, the prosecution appears eager to signal some supporters of Mr. Milosevic who have warned that they will disclose or denounce all witnesses, including those who testify in private.
While the military remains deeply powerful, the prosecution of Mr. Musharraf signaled that even Pakistan's top generals are sometimes subject to the rule of law — at least after they have retired.
Indeed, were the passage of time and the age of the perpetrators used as a reason for non-prosecution it would signal the genocidaires at work today that all they need to do is keep their heads down for long enough and they will escape retribution.
There are very few such villains left, and most are in their 80s; the trials, many thought, would end with them.The new prosecutions seem to signal a more open-ended future for the ECCC, to the chagrin of Cambodia's current government: these are the first cadres to be charged in more than seven years.
Nicholas Bequelin, a researcher in Hong Kong for Human Rights Watch, said he feared that the prosecution of Mr. Liu would signal a harder government line against political dissidents.
But Steven Aftergood, director of the project on government secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists, said the fizzling of the Drake prosecution "ought to be a signal to the government to rethink its approach to these cases".
But the government signaled that its prosecution of Andersen for obstruction of justice was continuing unabated, arguing in a blistering court filing that the firm's public campaign to protest its indictment was potentially tampering with witness testimony and influencing prospective jurors with "slanted and outright false" information about the case.
