Newsman: The International Criminal Court’s pre-trial chamber II issued an arrest warrant on Friday, for the arrest of Russia’s Commissioner for Children’s Rights Maria Alekseyevna Lvova-Belova. The orders state that each are “allegedly responsible for the war crime of unlawful deportation” of children from occupied territories in Ukraine to Russia, the UN-backed court said in announcing the warrants.
The UN Spokesperson Stéphane Dujarric, stressed that the ICC and the UN were “separate institutions, with separate mandates” when asked by reporters to comment on the arrest warrants at the regular Noon Briefing in New York on Friday.
“The crimes were allegedly committed in Ukrainian occupied territory at least from 24 February 2022,” the ICC detailed. “There are reasonable grounds to believe that Mr. Putin and Ms. Lvova-Belova bear individual criminal responsibility.”
All allegations are in line with the Rome Statute. Neither Russia nor Ukraine are parties to the statute, which created the judicial body in 1998.
Russia like the US does not participate to the International criminal court and recognizef the International criminal court. Through presidential decrees issued by President Putin, the law was changed in Russia to expedite the conferral of Russian citizenship, making it easier for them to be adopted by Russian families.
“My Office alleges that these acts, amongst others, demonstrate an intention to permanently remove these children from their own country,” he said. “At the time of these deportations, the Ukrainian children were protected persons under the Fourth Geneva Convention.”
The ICC issued warrant citing the need to protect victims and witnesses and to “safeguard” the ongoing investigation. It said it was making the arrest warrants public because it believed doing so could prevent the “further commission of crimes.”
“There are reasonable grounds to believe that Mr. Putin bears individual criminal responsibility for the aforementioned crimes … for having committed the acts directly, jointly with others and/or through others … and for his failure to exercise control properly over civilian and military subordinates who committed the acts, or allowed for their commission, and who were under his effective authority and control, pursuant to superior responsibility,” the ICC said in a statement.
The Chamber had initially decided that the warrants should not be published in order to protect victims and witnesses and also to safeguard the investigation. However, mindful that the conduct addressed in the present situation is allegedly ongoing, and that the public awareness of the warrants may contribute to the prevention of the further commission of crimes, the Chamber considered that it is “in the interests of justice to authorize the Registry to publicly disclose the existence of the warrants, the name of the suspects, the crimes for which the warrants are issued, and the modes of liability as established by the Chamber”, the ICC said.
The deportation includes by coercion and force, of potentially tens of thousands of Ukrainian children without their families.
The ICC’s arrest warrant for Putin and Lvova-Belova marks the international court’s first arrest warrant since Russia invaded Ukraine. Moscow has repeatedly denied allegations of war crimes in Ukraine.
The ICC, which is based in The Hague, Netherlands, alleges Putin and Maria Alekseyevna Lvova-Belova is responsible for war crimes.
David Scheffer, the first U.S. Ambassador at Large for War Crimes Issues, said the charges are significant for both the war in Ukraine and for the global geopolitical stage.
“This is not the first time the ICC has indicted or issued an arrest warrant for a head of state. It did so before with Bashir in Sudan and with Qaddafi in Libya,” he said, referring to Omar al-Bashir, former President of Sudan and Muammar al-Qaddafi, Libya’s former leader. “Henceforth, Putin will always be described as not only the President of Russia but as an indicted fugitive of the International Criminal Court as a war criminal.”
Scheffer, who is now the director emeritus of the Center for International Human Rights at Northwestern University’s law school, said there’s no statute of limitations on the war crimes which Putin’s charged with.
