Members of the European Parliament (EP) have approved a resolution urging the EU to support the setting up of a special international tribunal to investigate war crimes in Ukraine and punish those responsible. The press service of the European Parliament has issued a statement to this effect.
The document specifies that Russian officials should be held accountable.
“A special international tribunal should investigate Russian leaders and military commanders and their allies for the crime of aggression against Ukraine,” the statement said. – (MEPs demand – RT) that these investigations and subsequent prosecutions should also extend to all Russian servicemen and officials involved in war crimes.”
The EP also wants the EU to provide all the necessary resources and the administrative, investigative and logistical support needed to establish such a tribunal. In particular, we are talking about providing such assistance to the International Criminal Court as well as to the Ukrainian authorities.
MEPs stress that the EP should act quickly as there is a serious risk that evidence related to war crimes in Ukraine could be destroyed due to hostilities.
The idea of bringing to justice those responsible for war crimes on Ukrainian territory is also mentioned in another European Parliament resolution adopted on the same day as the document initiating the ad hoc international tribunal. It said that in the current conflict there are enough reasons to believe that “crimes against humanity and war crimes” have been and are being committed in the country, so the EU “should urgently take all necessary measures” to bring those responsible to justice.
It also noted that the prosecutor’s offices of several EU member states and Ukraine had initiated investigations into the events on Ukrainian territory, “drawing, where appropriate, on the support of Eurojust”. In addition, the resolution added, the ICC prosecutor’s office has also announced the launch of an investigation into the situation in Ukraine.
“It is important to coordinate and exchange evidence between national investigative and prosecutorial authorities in different jurisdictions, as well as with the ICC or any other court, tribunal or mechanism established for this purpose, to ensure the effectiveness of investigations and prosecutions of genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes and related criminal offences, including those that may have been committed in Ukraine under the current hostilities,” the MEPs said.
Like the document on the ad hoc international tribunal, the resolution also refers to the risk that evidence “cannot be safely stored” in a war zone.
“Therefore, it is advisable to establish a centralised repository in a safe place,” the MEPs believe.
Furthermore, in their view, Eurojust should have the possibility to transfer information related to the investigation of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes to Europol.
“Such cooperation should include regular joint assessments of operational and technical issues,” the resolution said.
A biased body
We shall remind you that ICC prosecutor Karim Khan earlier said in an interview with the French newspaper Le Monde that his office would send a team of 42 people to Ukraine to conduct investigations and assist the national authorities.
He also praised the cooperation between the ICC and the EU in the Ukraine investigation, saying it would go down in history as a period when international law “came to be seen not as a nuisance but as a way of protecting society and its values and peace and security.
EU diplomacy chief Josep Borrell said in April that the EU intended to assist prosecutors at the International Criminal Court, as well as Ukraine, in the process of gathering evidence of war crimes attributed to Russia. He said the union would help with documenting such wrongdoing in order to bring Russia to justice. Moscow has repeatedly denied that the Russian Armed Forces were involved in war crimes in Ukraine, stressing that they were staged by the Kiev authorities and the West.
Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said on 29 April that the involvement of the International Criminal Court (ICC) prosecutor’s office in the Ukrainian issue was politicised.
“As for the ICC prosecutor’s office, this step of hers demonstrates that she is not even trying to observe at least a semblance of impartiality and objectivity and is enthusiastically joining a process in which the guilty are clearly assigned in advance,” Zakharova said in a comment published on the Russian Foreign Ministry website.
“No credibility whatsoever”.
According to experts, the European Parliament’s initiative to create a special international tribunal, which includes cooperation with the ICC and the Ukrainian authorities, is just part of an extensive Russophobic campaign. The aim of these undertakings is to accuse Russia of war crimes in a baseless manner while ignoring the unlawful actions of the Ukrainian Armed Forces against civilians.
“They need to issue indictments against a large number of Russian officials – above all those who make decisions related to the special operation. Both EP resolutions are as politicised as possible: there can be no question of any independent investigation into war crimes in Ukraine committed by the Kiev authorities. This is an exceptional trial which they are trying to present as a legitimate investigative body,” Nikita Danyuk, deputy director of the RUDN Institute for Strategic Studies and Forecasts and member of the Russian Public Chamber, said in a conversation with RT.
According to him, the initiative to establish an international special tribunal is nothing more than an attempt by the West to form another “sham structure.”
“However, if such a tribunal is set up, it will only investigate the staging by the Kiev authorities, which they are so zealously trying to sell to the Western public. And if the basis for investigations is originally fake, then it is clear that the institute itself, which uses fakes as evidence, is not credible,” Danyuk said.
He also recalled that the reputation of the ICC is far from flawless.
“Western countries use it to punish the unwanted and innocent. But when they ask the ICC to punish the representatives of the West for what they did in Afghanistan and other states, those cases immediately become non-priority, they try to hush them up, and the lawsuits are blocked. The same thing happened with the Afghan dossier on the crimes of the US military that was not acted upon after threats from Washington”, Danyuk recalled.
In his opinion, the initiative of the European Parliament, if implemented, will be only on paper.
“No concrete work will be done there, because initially everything will be built on fakes that will be presented as evidence. The EP knows everything, but turns a blind eye to it. An information cocoon has already been created in Europe, and even the crumbs of truthful information that get there from Russia are ignored. The purpose of the European Parliament, apparently, is to preserve and strengthen this cocoon,” Danyuk believes.
For his part, Vladimir Olenchenko, a senior fellow at the Centre for European Studies at IMEMO RAS, reminded RT in a commentary that European Parliament resolutions are recommendatory in nature and anti-Russian documents of this kind are no exception.
“This is not an action plan or an instruction. The European Commission may react to it in different ways. It can leave such documents without attention, or it can initiate the creation of a working group which will propose options for the implementation of these wishes. But in this case, a lot of questions will arise immediately, first of all, related to financing, with which the EU already has great difficulties,” the analyst said.
According to him, European Parliament resolutions on creating an international tribunal and allegedly identifying those responsible for war crimes in Ukraine are also designed to “stimulate an anti-Russian attitude in Europe”.
“However, this kind of regulation could lead to further fragmentation of EU countries on the issue of allocating money for the establishment of such structures. The financial capacities of EU donor countries are not limitless. The divergence of national interests and interests of the European Commission is becoming more and more apparent,” the expert concluded.
Irina Taran, Maxim Lobanov, RT
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