Law is not always subject to enforcement by official such as police or immigration officers. International law is the area of law that is most fraught with enforcement difficulties. International law emerged as that special body of legal principles that governs relations among sovereign states, just as ordinary domestic (or national) law regulates relations between citizens of the same country and between the government and the citizenry. In recent years international law has been called on to attempt to indict dictators who threaten their own people, but so far it has been unsuccessful. For example, in March 2009 the international criminal court issued an arrest warrant for Sudan’s Omar al-Bashir for war crimes and crimes against humanity against the people of Darfur, in the west of Sudan, but he continues to govern. Just how international law can be used by one country or one group of countries to intervene in the internal affairs of a far-away nation is not at all clear. What is clear is that there is little point in having international agreements and UN conventions on basic rights if there is no enforcement mechanism. As the seventeenth century English legal theorist Thomas Hobbes famously put it, “Covenants without the sword are but words. Enforcement, then, which may involve violence, is an integral part of law.