“What we did was follow the path indicated by the evidence,” the British attorney general of the International Criminal Court, Karim A. Khan, declared a few days ago, referring to the decision of the highest criminal court on the planet to issue a arrest warrant against Russian President Vladimir Putin.
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After a year of collecting names, dates, places and testimonies, The prosecution submitted the request for the arrest warrant to the preliminary chamber of the ICC, and on March 17 the chamber issued the measure.
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As of that date, Putin and his commissioner for the defense of children’s rights, Maria Lvova-Belova, also covered by the arrest warrant, must avoid traveling to 123 countries that recognize the jurisdiction of the Court. There they could be detained and brought before the court based in The Hague, to be prosecuted for war crimes for the deportation and “illegal transfer” of Ukrainian minors to Russian territory.
It is a true turning point in international criminal policy.
“It is a historic decision,” said the office of the Ukrainian president, Volodimir Zelensky. “It has no legal value,” reacted the Kremlin. “I think it is justified,” US President Joe Biden said of the measure.
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Neither Russia nor the United States recognize the jurisdiction of the ICC, but even so the order carries enormous judicial and political weight. Although it is not the first time that the court has directed its batteries against a head of state – in the past the Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi and the Ivorian president Laurent Gbagbo were accused -, never before had a court order for the arrest of the president of a country that was a permanent member of the UN security council.
“It is a real turning point in international criminal policy,” said lawyer Sandrine de Sena, professor and researcher at the University of Paris-Pantheon-Assas. “In the past, the tendency was to focus on the perpetrators of the crimes, and in this case they go after the highest responsible,” the expert added to the French newspaper 20 Minutes. “The measure – she concluded – isolates Putin on the international scene.”
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missing children
The ICC rarely discloses the arrest warrants it issues. He prefers to keep them confidential to avoid alerting the defendants. In this case, “the judges decided to make the mandate public to prevent new crimes,” explained Piotr Hofmanski, the respected Polish jurist who chairs the ICC.
Although the arrest warrants against Putin and Commissioner Lvova-Belova are public, the ICC keeps the content and evidence of the investigation confidential. “That content is secret to protect the victims,” Hofmanski said when announcing the measure.
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Secret and copious, according to several sources who know him. The ICC has had great resources: Since the start of the invasion, the European Union has provided the court with 10 million euros to finance investigations into possible war crimes.
Despite the reservation, a document analyzing the case in the hands of French jurists, a memorandum that has circulated in the chancelleries of the European Union and reports from human rights groups that have collaborated with the court, have allowed EL TIEMPO Gather information about the scope and some evidence for the prosecution.
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The initial complaints arose from the Government of Ukraine and various NGOs from that country, Russia, and Europe and the United States. The Zelensky government has detailed information on the deportation to Russian territory of 16,000 minors, from areas occupied by the invading troops.. But Ukraine’s ombudsman, Dimitro Lubinets, believes the figure may be much higher, as high as 150,000.
orphans
Before the invasion, many of these children were in shelters: some were orphans, others had been abandoned, and still others were there because the authorities had suspended custody of their parents. There are hundreds of cases of disabled people being treated in these centers, who were also taken to Russia and of whose fate nothing is known. At the beginning of the war, when Putin’s troops occupied vast areas of the north, east and southeast of Ukraine, thousands of minors interned in these centers were deported by the invaders to Russia, with the excuse of protecting them from the fighting.
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Once the Russian troops were forced back and Ukraine regained almost all the territory that had been invaded in the north, as well as a part of the east and southeast, the vast majority of children transferred from those areas never returned.
As for the areas of eastern and south-eastern Ukraine still held by the Russians, there are reports of massive deportations. But in those areas, where the kyiv government has no representative, it is much more difficult to establish and verify figures.
ICC prosecutors have gathered hundreds of testimonies from authorities, parents, captured Russian soldiers testifying to the deportations, as well as reliable sources in the invaded zone and on Russian territory. There is also what the few hundred children who have returned to Ukraine say. The returns do not exceed the figure of 300, less than 2% of the 16,000 deportees registered by Kiev, and barely 2 per thousand of the number of transfers referred to by the Lubinets ombudsman.
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The test reigns
But perhaps the strongest evidence against Putin and his commissioner for minors has been provided by the Kremlin itself. The Russian Government has a public adoption program, with a very active website that is easy to consult and operate. Is called usynovite.ru, something like “adopte.ru” which has reportedly been used hundreds of times for deported Ukrainian children to be adopted by Russian families.
Anyone wishing to adopt can consult the photograph of the minor, their age, weight, height and blood group, and various physical features such as hair and eye color on this website. In the database of children who are candidates for adoption, the website has hundreds of minors from the areas of Ukraine invaded by Russian troops, from Crimea –occupied in 2014– to the regions taken last year in Zaporizhia, Kherson, Lugansk and Donetsk.
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“In the records examined by the ICC, people in Russia appear to have adopted up to a dozen children, and this has led us to think the worst, since in the midst of the Russian economic crisis, one of the explanations for these mass adoptions by part of the same family is that it can be trafficking, abuse and prostitution of minors”, says one of the documents consulted by EL TIEMPO.
In the records examined by the ICC, people in Russia appear to have adopted up to a dozen children, and this has led to the worst.
The Yale School of Public Health, in the United States, released a comprehensive report in February on nearly fifty “re-education” and “Russification” centers, both in territories invaded by Russian troops and in regions of Russia as far away as Siberia. . His investigations allowed him to conclude that Some 6,000 Ukrainian minors have been taken to these centers, where they change their names, make them Russian citizens, in some cases they train them for the military and, in many others, they give them up for adoption.
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The evidence linking Putin and Commissioner Lvova-Belova to this entire criminal operation was produced by the Kremlin itself: it is contained in the video of a meeting that the two held a year ago, shortly after the invasion began, in the president’s office Russian, and that was released by the president’s office.
During the meeting, the commissioner asks what she calls her “direct superior” to help her resolve a situation that hindered the adoptions of children from the occupied areas. As they were Ukrainian nationals, Russian law did not allow their adoption by Russian families. Within a few days, Putin brought a bill to the Duma (Parliament) to expeditiously grant these minors Russian nationality, and the Duma approved it.
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“The interview between Vladimir Putin and Maria Lvova-Belova, published on the official website of the Kremlin, and the decree-laws that followed it, testify, before international justice, the intention and the role of the leaders of the Russian Federation in the organization of the largest kidnapping and forced adoption operation since World War II”, says a public letter, disclosed in the newspaper the world of Paris, and signed by dozens of lawyers, intellectuals, artists and human rights defenders.
This video, the norms approved by the duma, the testimonies and records held by Kiev and various NGOs, and hundreds of other supporting documents, consolidate the case against Putin and his commissar, and allow them to be charged. As the President of the European Commission, Úrsula van der Leyen, recalled a few days ago, “the deportation of children is a war crime”.
(Also read: The ICC issues an arrest warrant against Russian President Vladimir Putin)
The fact that there is such strong evidence against Putin does not guarantee that he will be captured and tried. That will depend much more on the final outcome of the war. Meanwhile, it is easy to assume that the Russian president will avoid traveling to the 123 countries that accept ICC jurisdiction. It is not difficult for someone who rarely leaves Russia and who usually remains a refugee in his Kremlin offices. But in any case, the court’s indictment leaves him, of course, enrolled in the history books as a war criminal.
MAURICIO VARGAS LINARES
FOR THE TIME
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