The world must hold Vladimir Putin and his inner circle accountable for international crimes — war crimes, crimes against humanity, and the crime of aggression. Crimes should be investigated and the appropriate tribunal found to ensure that the perpetrators face justice. Gathering and preserving evidence is critical.
War crimes are violations of the laws of war as set out in the Geneva Conventions. They include the willful killing of civilians, starvation of the civilian population by blocking food and humanitarian assistance as in Mariupol, unnecessarily destroying property, sexual violence, ethnic cleansing, and using banned weapons that cause indiscriminate suffering. National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, said on ABC’s “This Week,” that the war crimes committed by Russian forces in Ukraine are part of Putin’s master plan for the invasion, and that before the war began, the U.S. declassified and presented intelligence, showing that the plan from the highest level of the Russian government was to target civilians, to use violence against them and brutalize them “in order to terrorize the population and subjugate it.”
The evidence is overwhelming that Russia targeted civilian sites with widespread air and artillery barrages, indiscriminately hitting a train station, schools, churches, hospitals, and theaters. As forces retreated from the area around Kyiv, they left a trail of atrocities — civilians executed with hands tied behind their backs, bodies lying on city streets, and mass graves where bodies were dumped. 10,000 civilians were reportedly killed in Mariupol.
In this digital age of cell phones and video recordings of these atrocities, sufficient evidence with photos, interviews, and documentation is available, based upon investigative reporters’ findings, intelligence available to the U.S. and its allies, and information gathered by Ukraine, international organizations, and NGOs.
Past precedents of prosecuting those accused of war crimes include the Nuremberg Tribunal trying Nazis for war crimes and the prosecution of Khmer Rouge leaders in Cambodia. Currently, The Hague Tribunal is hearing a case of war crimes committed by an accused leader of the Janjaweed militia in the Darfur region of Sudan.
Crimes against humanity are defined as those “committed as part of a widespread or systematic attack directed against any civilian population,” which include murder, torture, and sexual violence. The legal difference between “war crimes” and “crimes against humanity” is that war crimes exist in an armed conflict. The evidence in Ukraine supports both war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Under the 1948 Treaty on Genocide, the crime of “genocide” requires showing of intent to destroy, “in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group.” While the egregious crimes in Ukraine have indeed been horrific, they do not meet the definition of “genocide,” and President Zelensky’s calling Russia’s actions as “genocide” was a political statement, not having the legal meaning.
The International Criminal Court can prosecute war crimes as well as crimes against humanity committed by the Russian forces in Ukraine, for which there is massive evidence to bring these cases. Ukraine is not a party to the Court, but it has accepted the Court’s jurisdiction for crimes committed on its soil. Kahrim Khan, Chief Prosecutor of the ICC, has already opened the initial investigation of war crimes after referral by 39 nations, an unprecedented move.
But the challenge will be to link Putin to these crimes through the command chain, which is always a major hurdle. And although the ICC can now prosecute the crime of aggression, after this was recently added to its statute, it is yet unable to try those responsible for the Russian invasion because a country that is not a party to the Court is not subject to its jurisdiction, and Russia is not a party. As a promising…
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