The security and intelligence services that underpin many of the Middle East’s autocratic regimes have always acted with impunity. Now the United Nations Security Council has a chance to change this wretch­ed record. By creating a special tribunal to try the killers of Ra­fiq Hariri, Lebanon’s former prime minister, the Council can send a powerful, and welcome, message that assassins will not go unpunished.

The 2005 murder of Hariri – the billionaire businessman and architect of the country’s post-civil war reconstruction – internationalised the crisis inside Lebanon and between Lebanon and Syria. Damascus ran Lebanon as a fief and lucrative racket for nearly three decades. Forced out by popular protest after the assassination, it has since been in sharp conflict with the elected government in Beirut and its western backers. UN investigators have identified murder suspects close to the top of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad’s security establishment.