JUDGES probably know more about tragedy and cruelty than any other group in society.

They see the worst that the world has to offer, and then, somehow, they must apply the rule of law in an attempt to make sense of the chaos.

Working as a judge for the United Nations in the crippled state of Kosovo, Judge Timothy Clayson saw his fair share of horror and tragedy.

He presided over war crimes and terrorism trials and saw first hand how ethnic hatred led to the slaughter of innocent lives.

Now, sitting in his office at Bolton Crown Court, Judge Clayson believes that period in his life has left an indelible mark which has informed the way he has carried out his duties ever since.

Judge Clayson, aged 56, from Leeds, qualified as a barrister in 1974.

But after 26 years prosecuting and defending cases he was ready for a new challenge.

He had already been working as a Recorder, or part-time judge, so when the UN started looking for international judges in 2000 to help deal with the aftermath of the NATO intervention in Kosovo, he jumped at the chance.

In the mid-1990s an ethnic Albanian guerrilla movement, the Kosovo Liberation Army, stepped up its attacks on Serbian targets. The attacks precipitated a major, and brutal, Yugoslav military crackdown.

Nato began air strikes against targets in Kosovo and Serbia in March, 1999 after Yugoslav leader Slobodan Milosevic led a campaign of “ethnic cleansing” against Kosovo Albanians.

Hundreds of thousands of refugees fled to Albania, Macedonia and Montenegro. Thousands of people died in the conflict.

Serbian forces were driven out in the summer of 1999 and the UN took over the administration of the province.

“We were parachuted into the local legal system. We were appointed as judges of the district courts of Kosovo, so it’s just like being appointed as a crown court judge here,” said Judge Clayson.

He found himself inside a foreign legal system, which did not use jurors to find verdicts — those decisions were left to the judges to make on their own.

Cases involving war crimes, terrorism, and murder on “ethnic” grounds were common.

He said: “What was to my mind very remarkable about this was that we were doing these often incredibly sensitive cases in the public forum in Kosovo. Not in some barricaded compound but actually in the local courts.

“It was a huge learning curve. Massive really.”

Two cases had a particularly strong impact on Judge Clayson.

The first involved the murder of a young Serb, who was shot dead in a small market by Albanian youths motivated by ethnic hatred.

The boy’s 16-year-old sister was the main witness for the prosecution.

He said: “She was telling her story about this lad, and it was tragic in the extreme because the first shot hit him in the leg and the second shot, from behind, struck him in the lower back. But because he was falling, the angle of the bullet went right up his back and exited through his shoulder. He probably wouldn’t have been killed if he hadn’t been falling.

“To me, it seemed so incredibly dreadful as a tragedy, never mind as a crime.”

The other case was a war crimes trial which lasted five months and was held in the capital Pristina.

Judge Clayson, who was the principal judge for the trial, said: “There was huge security because these four guys, who were Albanians, were regarded by some people as war heroes because they had been in the Kosovo Liberation Army.

“They had run a form of detention centre which we were able to go and see up in the hills where they had kept a number of people in really dire conditions in what was an old cattle stable. “ Judge Clayson said it was tough to deal with such horrible stories of murder and cruelty, but he knew he had a responsibility to the people of Kosovo.

“We treated it as a job and all the time in the back of your mind is the thought that doing this and doing it fairly and being very active in trying to process cases was something of real value to this society and I actually believe it was.”

Looking back at his time there, Judge Clayson added: “It just makes you appreciate so much more keenly what we have here.

“And, also I think it gave me more confidence in making judgements about the gravity of the cases that come before me on a daily basis.”