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Notes -
That is a French domestic case - I don't think many countries are that lackadaisical about sophisticated international criminals who get caught.
I don't understand the lackadaisical attitude toward likely recidivism in any case, so maybe I'm way off base here, but how would "international" make anybody become harsher? "Good thing for our local criminal that he's in our custody where all we'd have to do to crack down is say the word, not halfway around the world where we'd have to declare war to get him properly punished, because a declaration of war we'd totally do!" If anything I'd expect the modern west to go easier on fargroup members while the "modern" North Korea would be happy to oblige.
My claim is not that France would be more assiduous in trying to punish a Nork attacking France than a Frenchman attacking France - as you point out, the French can't punish an individual Nork in North Korea without North Korean co-operation or an unacceptable risk of nuclear war. The point I am making is that the French would be more assiduous if a Frenchman (or a foreigner operating on French territory) attacked a friendly country (and got caught, which is admittedly unlikely) than if said delinquent frog was only attacking French targets.
As a matter of international law, sovereign states are expected to prevent their territory being used to attack countries they are not at war with. At least as regards countries which are actually friendly, countries take this obligation seriously.
If you take the cynical view that states protect their own interests and not the interests of their populations, embarrassing the King on the international stage is a worse crime than violating the King's peace domestically.
That makes sense in the Frenchman-attacking-allied-countries case; I just think there are a lot of other combinations of attacker and victim where the international nature of the crime will have the opposite effect.
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