I have just been reading Joe Biden has called for the prosecution of Vladimir Putin for war crimes after the discovery in Bucha, Ukraine, of mass graves and bodies of bound civilians shot at close range. But bringing the Russian president to trial would be far from simple.
The international criminal court the world’s first permanent war crimes tribunal, defines them as “grave breaches” of the Geneva Conventions, a set of humanitarian laws to be observed in war.
Jonathan Hafetz, an international criminal law and national security scholar at Seton Hall University School of Law, told the Reuters news agency that the execution of civilians as alleged in Bucha was a “quintessential war crime”.
The prosecution could argue that Putin and his inner circle committed a war crime by directly ordering an illegal attack or knew crimes were being committed and failed to prevent them. This case may be hard to prove in isolation but if it fits a wider pattern across Ukraine, it becomes more compelling. The US had accused Russia of war crimes even before Bucha.
Philippe Sands, a professor at University College London, told the Associated Press: “You’ve got to prove that they knew or they could have known or should have known. There’s a real risk you end up with trials of mid-level people in three years and the main people responsible for this horror – Putin, Lavrov, the minister of defence, the intelligence folks, the military folks and the financiers who are supporting it – will get off the hook.”
I'm wondering how Putin could be arrested and forced to face a court for war crimes, who's nutty enough to go to the Kremlin, knock on the front door and show an arrest warrant and telling Putin ''You're nicked'':???:
icasso, Bernie Sanders, FDR,... They did not use it for their own populations .
