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The Future of War Crimes Justice

E-BookEPUBePub WasserzeichenE-Book
144 Seiten
Englisch
Melville House UKerschienen am22.02.2024
From Russia to The Democratic Republic of Congo to Myanmar, Chris Stephen ponders the future of prosecuting war criminals who think themselves untouchable in this timely new book, part of Melville House UK's FUTURES series. As the world grows increasingly turbulent, war crimes justice is needed more than ever. But it is failing. The International Criminal Court in the Netherlands, the world's first permanent war crimes court, opened in 2002 but it has jailed just five war criminals to date. Meanwhile, wars continue to rage around the globe. So what has gone wrong, and can it be fixed? Journalist and war correspondent Chris Stephen takes a colourful look at the erratic history of war crimes justice, and the pioneers who created it. He examines its shortcomings, and options for making it more effective, including the case for prosecuting the corporations and banks who fund warlords. Casting the net wider, he examines alternatives to war crimes trials, and peers into the minds of war criminals themselves. With war law advocates fighting for justice on one side, and reluctant governments unwilling to relinquish control on the other, will the world of the future be governed by rule-of-law, or might-is-right?

Chris Stephen has reported from nine wars for publications including The Guardian and The New York Times Magazine. He writes on war crimes developments for journals including the International Institute for Strategic Studies and is author of Judgement Day: The Trial of Slobodan Milosevic, published by Atlantic Books. He lives in London.mehr
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Produkt

KlappentextFrom Russia to The Democratic Republic of Congo to Myanmar, Chris Stephen ponders the future of prosecuting war criminals who think themselves untouchable in this timely new book, part of Melville House UK's FUTURES series. As the world grows increasingly turbulent, war crimes justice is needed more than ever. But it is failing. The International Criminal Court in the Netherlands, the world's first permanent war crimes court, opened in 2002 but it has jailed just five war criminals to date. Meanwhile, wars continue to rage around the globe. So what has gone wrong, and can it be fixed? Journalist and war correspondent Chris Stephen takes a colourful look at the erratic history of war crimes justice, and the pioneers who created it. He examines its shortcomings, and options for making it more effective, including the case for prosecuting the corporations and banks who fund warlords. Casting the net wider, he examines alternatives to war crimes trials, and peers into the minds of war criminals themselves. With war law advocates fighting for justice on one side, and reluctant governments unwilling to relinquish control on the other, will the world of the future be governed by rule-of-law, or might-is-right?

Chris Stephen has reported from nine wars for publications including The Guardian and The New York Times Magazine. He writes on war crimes developments for journals including the International Institute for Strategic Studies and is author of Judgement Day: The Trial of Slobodan Milosevic, published by Atlantic Books. He lives in London.
Details
Weitere ISBN/GTIN9781911545668
ProduktartE-Book
EinbandartE-Book
FormatEPUB
Format HinweisePub Wasserzeichen
FormatE101
Erscheinungsjahr2024
Erscheinungsdatum22.02.2024
ReiheThe FUTURES Series
Reihen-Nr.3
Seiten144 Seiten
SpracheEnglisch
Dateigrösse670 Kbytes
Artikel-Nr.13949256
Rubriken
Genre9201

Inhalt/Kritik

Leseprobe



The Putin Problem


The prosecution of Vladimir Putin is easy. Easy, in the sense that the collision of three hurricanes is the perfect storm. It is easy because the two obstacles that confront most war crimes cases are easy to surmount in the Putin case.

War crimes trials are two trials in one. First, the crimes themselves, out on the battlefield. The missile slamming into a hospital; murder and torture. The second trial is working up the chain of command to the boss. In complexity and expense, it is like one of the anti-Mafia prosecutions in Italy or the United States. Many trigger-pullers, many crimes, many bosses.

In most of the short history of war crimes trials, proving both the crimes and the chain of command to the top are a problem. Finding the trigger-pullers means sifting mass graves and locating survivors. The chain of command is equally difficult to establish because few commanders order war crimes in writing. And, in much of the world, a commander has no formal position, and there is no easy way to tie them to crimes of subordinates. Neither is a problem with the Putin case.

A day after the Vuhledar hospital missile attack, detailed reports were published by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. Unlike most wars, investigators were on the ground to watch crimes as they happened. The problem was not shortage of evidence, but the huge quantity of it.

Putin announced that the Ukraine invasion was a special military operation and would last a few days. Ukrainian resistance, and weapons from Nato, wrecked that timetable. Russia s forces were too poorly equipped and too few in number for the multiple axes of advance of the invasion. In late March, Russian forces abandoned their attempt to encircle the capital, Kyiv, and retreated to the Belarusian border. Ukrainian forces surged into the vacated territory and found new horrors. In Bucha, a suburb of Kyiv, the bodies of 419 civilians killed by various weapons were found. Dozens had their hands tied behind their backs, killed with a bullet to the head.

A torture chamber was uncovered in a basement, where mutilated bodies were discovered. Survivors emerged from the ruins to tell investigators, from the ICC and from Ukraine itself, about torture and beatings. Women and teenaged girls reported being gang-raped by soldiers. Crucially, investigators were able to identify the Russian units involved. The evidence came from witnesses and signals intercepts, but also from more unlikely sources: cellphones found on the bodies of dead soldiers, discarded uniforms, identification panels on smashed tanks, graffiti on the walls and intercepted text messages from the soldiers themselves.

Positively identifying the units, and often the soldiers, who had committed the crimes made the second part of the case equally easy. Evidence for a chain of command stretching to the Kremlin was provided by Russia itself. Article 87 of the Russian constitution specifies that the president is commander-in-chief of the armed forces. That makes him responsible for what those forces do. The president issues orders to a security council of senior generals responsible for carrying out his wishes. In lay terms, that makes Putin s indictment an open-and-shut case.

Aiming for the top is key in war crimes prosecutions. That is based on a simple logic. If you charge only the trigger-pullers, that leaves a warlord free to recruit more trigger-pullers. The only surprise, when Putin was indicted, was the choice of crime. The bombs and missiles, massacres, rape and torture were ignored. Instead he was charged with just one crime - the deportation of Ukrainian children.

At face value, ignoring all the other crimes makes no sense. But it makes sense politically.

The ICC s chief prosecutor, Britain s Karim Khan, who has long war crimes experience, was a bold choice to lead the court. He is the first ICC chief prosecutor to have made his name defending, not prosecuting, war criminals. Among his former clients are Liberia s Charles Taylor, jailed for horrors in Sierra Leone so extensive that the term blood diamonds was coined to describe them. He worked also to defend Saif Gaddafi, son of the former Libyan dictator. Khan lost both cases: Taylor was jailed and Gaddafi remains indicted, and officially on the run. But Khan drew admiration for working with what he had. Charging Putin with child abduction appeared designed to highlight one of the most perverse of crimes.

First, the crime is particularly abhorrent. Ukraine says more than a thousand children were captured from occupied territory, then sent back to Russia. What happened to them is no secret: Putin himself boasted about it. They were distributed among Russian families, to be adopted as their own. He is jointly charged with Maria Lvova-Belova, the presidential commissioner for children s rights. Far from hiding it, both were filmed by Russian television boasting of the programme. In lay terms, prosecutors see it as the equivalent of bank robbers filming themselves robbing the bank.

The charge was issued with an eye on Russia s remaining allies. Those allies might dismiss war crimes charges for massacres and bombardment as the inevitable detritus of war, but child abduction is something uniquely detestable. Nobody wants to be pictured shaking hands with a child abductor.

With this choice of charge, Khan highlighted that war crimes justice is not just about punishment, but prevention. The dead cannot be brought back to life, but captured children can be returned. Within a week of the charge being filed, Russia began sending some of the captured children home.

It is unlikely, either, to be the only indictment. Khan is free to add more charges later. Moscow knows he may already have done so, in so-called sealed warrants, which are secret indictments. That should be worrying all officials involved in the child abduction. The significance, likely not lost on the Kremlin, is that Khan was unafraid to indict the top man. Moscow may have been hoping that the year s delay in issuing charges for the Ukraine invasion meant the court was nervous. By contrast, it took just three months for the ICC to charge Muammar Gaddafi with war crimes. Charging the president of a nuclear-armed power carries political risks, and military ones too. Days after the charges were announced, Moscow officials told television interviewers they planned on targeting the Hague courthouse with the same missiles being fired at Ukraine.

Yet the reality is that no matter how many charges are attached to Putin, there is nothing to compel him to come to trial. Despite its name, the ICC is not a world court. Rather, it works like a private members club. States join it, and collectively govern it. They all agree to be judged by the court. A total of 123 nations have joined the court and Ukraine is among those non-members who give it jurisdiction. That means any war crimes on its territory can be investigated, no matter who commits them. But finding a way to bring Russians to trial is something else. This is all the more frustrating for prosecutors at The Hague, because they know if Putin does appear in the dock, most of the defences he might hope to use will fail.

Starting with the defence of necessity. The law says there is never an excuse for war crimes. And that precedent has a long history. It is a precedent taught in law schools around the world, and a vivid one.

In 1884, a cabin boy named Richard Parker was shipwrecked along with three crewmen. They jumped into a lifeboat in the Atlantic and drifted for three weeks. Facing starvation, the three older crewmen decided they had no choice but to kill and eat Parker. Later rescued, two of them confessed to having done it, thinking that what happened at sea stayed at sea.

Wrong, said a court in the English city of Exeter. In a ruling that has echoed down the years, the judges concluded that there is never a good reason for murder. War crimes law follows the same logic. A crime is a crime, no matter the circumstances.

Nor can Putin, or his co-accused, say they were following orders. That defence went out at Nuremberg, the trials of Nazis held after the Second World War. Putin is anyway cast in the role of the person giving the orders, but his generals would get no protection by claiming they were only following those orders. In law, an order to commit war crimes is illegal. The consequence is that following such an order is illegal too.

Putin might argue that the war crimes, if not necessary, were out of his hands. He had no choice but to let them happen. That too is no defence. The precedent was one of the very first modern war crimes convictions. In 1996 a former soldier in Bosnia, Drazen Erdemovic, came forward and confessed he had been part of the Srebrenica massacre. Serb forces had stormed the Bosnian town in 1995, then rounded up and slaughtered more than seven thousand men and boys. It was the biggest single massacre in Europe since the Second World War. Erdemovic told the judges he was confessing because he was wracked with guilt. He described being given a machine gun and told to mow down captives lined up in front of him. But, he said, he had no choice. If he had not killed the prisoners, his commanders would have shot him.

Too bad, said the judges. In law, you always have a choice. Not always a good choice, and in Erdemovic s case, a terrible one of kill or be killed. In law, a crime...

mehr

Autor

Chris Stephen has reported from nine wars for publications including The Guardian and The New York Times Magazine. He writes on war crimes developments for journals including the International Institute for Strategic Studies and is author of Judgement Day: The Trial of Slobodan Milosevic, published by Atlantic Books. He lives in London.
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