Moscow has opened a criminal investigation against International Criminal Court (ICC) prosecutor Karim Khan after the Hague-based court issued an arrest warrant for President Vladimir Putin over the deportation of children from Ukraine.
“The Russian Investigative Committee has opened a criminal case against ICC prosecutor Karim Ahmad Khan” and several ICC judges, the Investigative Committee said, stressing that their decision to seek Putin’s arrest is “illegal”.
“The actions taken by the judges of the International Criminal Court contain signs of crimes such as a knowingly illegal act of pre-trial detention, as well as preparations for an attack on a representative of a foreign state entitled to international protection with the aim of complicating relations
international organizations,” said the press service of the Investigative Committee of Russia, quoted by Russian agencies.
It was also disclosed that a criminal case against ICC prosecutor Khan was allegedly prosecuting a person who is known to be innocent and wrongfully accusing a person of committing a serious crime.
Will Not Hesitate to Act
Khan himself said today that the CPI magistrates “will not hesitate to act” on the alleged war crimes in Ukraine, before the opening in London of the international conference of justice ministers organized to mobilize additional resources to support the investigations of the Court. “Unfortunately Ukraine is a crime scene and a whole range of crimes appear to have been committed. We are conducting independent investigations,” the prosecutor told the BBC. “If reliable evidence is gathered, we will not hesitate to act,” Khan said.
More than 40 nations are attending the conference hosted by UK Deputy Prime Minister Dominic Raab and Dutch Minister for Justice and Security Dilan Yeşilgöz-Zegerius. The UK is providing an additional £395,000 to fund the work of the ICC. Denys Maliuska, Minister of Justice of Ukraine and Andriy Kostin, Prosecutor General of Ukraine will be present. According to which the International Criminal Court’s initiative on child abduction last week – for which arrest warrants were issued against President Vladimir Putin and Russian children’s rights advocate Live Maria Lvova-Belova – effectively eliminated the need for a special court.
Russia Have Found a Home With Russian Families
Lvova-Belova returned today to reject the accusations made against her, arguing that “to date, 380 orphans from new regions of Russia have found a home with Russian families. They were in care institutions. None have been separated from their parents “. “If there are legal representatives, we will do everything possible to reunite the families”, she added, explaining that today 15 children evacuated to Russia were reunited with Ukrainian relatives
The issuance of the mandates by the ICC was described as “monstrous” by the Deputy Chairman of the Security Council of the Russian Federation and former President Dmitry Medvedev, who announced in a Telegram post that it represents the beginning of a “gloomy sunset” for the entire system of international relations. Medvedev recalled that “everyone walks under God and missiles” and admitted the possibility of imagining “a spot use of the Onyx hypersonic missile” from a Russian ship on the International Criminal Court building in The Hague. In this situation, he said, the population of NATO countries would not suffer and the bloc would be afraid of going to war.
“There is a complete prejudice and dictatorship of a group of Anglo-Saxon countries”, he underlined, but “an equal has no power over an equal”. “Nobody needs” the International Criminal Court which has only brought to justice “three dozen unknowns,” he noted. “The effectiveness of their activities is zero. These are not the ad hoc Nuremberg and Tokyo tribunals. Or even the dubious court for Yugoslavia,” he wrote, explaining that in his view the leader of a country can only be judged whether the country “weakened wildly” and almost lost its sovereignty, or lost the war and capitulated. And further with regards to US crimes in Afghanistan and Iraq, the ICC has revealed itself helpless.
The statements of the Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman, Wang Wenbin, were more moderate, who in his daily briefing said that the Hague tribunal should “support an objective and impartial position” and “respect the immunity of heads of state from the jurisdiction under international law”, urging the ICC to “avoid both politicization and double standards”.
The reaction of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was of the opposite sign, who wrote in a message on Telegram: “The Ukrainian people defend themselves, when the strength of the United Nations Charter and the strength of justice are re-established in our land, this will guarantee peace to many other parts of the world as well”. El Lithuanian Foreign Minister, Gabrielius Landsbergis, commenting on the Chinese president’s visit to Moscow, said that “Visiting a war criminal casts a different light on the situation. I think Xi Jinping thinks he was deceived before the war, with l signed between Russia and China, has been duped about the war, and now understands that he is being dragged into the war without much room for him and this is not an ideal situation.”
And the Ukrainian presidency has also announced the creation of the ‘Children of war’ platform to search for minors who disappeared during the war, entering their names and surnames, and publishes the data in possession to the Kiev authorities. According to the National Information Office, the Russians deported 16,226 Ukrainian minors, but the platform also takes into account data published in open sources of the Russian Federation, according to which the number of children taken out of Ukraine reaches
the 744,000. Since February 24, 464 children have died, 935 been injured, 387 minors have disappeared, 308 have been returned and 10,576 have been found. The platform data comes from the Prosecutor General’s Office, the National Police, the Secretariat of the Commissioner for Human Rights of the Verkhovna Rada.
In addition to the possibility of searching for a minor by entering their name and surname, the portal offers advice and useful information for reporting or offering assistance to a child not accompanied by adults. “This portal was created as a tool to find, rescue and free children from places of forced relocation or deportation,” says Daria Gerasymchuk, the commissioner, authorized by the President of Ukraine, for children’s rights and rehabilitation of children, coordinator of the portal ‘Children of War’.
This article is originally published on ansa.it
