PARIS — The United Nations’ highest court Monday ordered Japan to halt its annual whaling hunt in the Southern Ocean around Antarctica, saying that its present program was not being carried out for scientific purposes, as Japan has claimed.

The U.N. war crimes tribunal in The Hague on Thursday acquitted a former commander of the rebel Kosovo Liberation Army of all charges of war crimes in a decision that could inflame anti-Kosovo sentiment in Serbia just weeks after Kosovo unilaterally declared independence.

The International Court of Justice on Monday for the first time called the massacre of Bosnian Muslims at Srebrenica in 1995 an act of genocide, but determined that Serbia itself was not guilty of the enormous crime.