Where can Russia’s Putin travel? How arrest warrant for war crimes limits places he can visit
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The International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for Russian President Vladimir Putin in March 2023.
PHOTO: AFP
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NEW YORK – Russian President Vladimir Putin is cautious about where he travels abroad
To visit any of the 123 countries that are members of the International Criminal Court (ICC) would mean he risks arrest on a warrant for alleged war crimes in Ukraine.
While the warrant has limited Mr Putin’s travels, it is far from certain that he or other senior Russian leaders will be brought to justice under international law.
Meanwhile, the ICC is investigating other potential atrocities. For its part, Ukraine put captured Russian soldiers on trial for war crimes within months of the conflict’s start.
What are war crimes?
They are violations of the rules of warfare
War crimes include wilful killing, torture, rape, using starvation as a weapon, shooting combatants who have surrendered, deploying banned weapons such as chemical and biological arms, and deliberately attacking civilian targets. The Kremlin has rejected allegations that its troops have committed such transgressions in Ukraine.
What is Putin accused of?
In arrest warrants issued on March 17, 2023,
As at late August, human rights experts estimate that more than 19,000 children were deported.
Russian officials say they have taken the children in as a wartime humanitarian gesture.
How has the warrant affected Putin’s travels?
Since the ICC announced the warrant, Mr Putin has not left Russia except to visit other states that are not parties to the court – China and former Soviet republics Belarus, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan – as well as Russian-occupied areas of Ukraine.
The Kremlin said on Dec 6 that he would visit the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia,
Mr Putin skipped the mid-August Brics summit
What crimes is the ICC investigating?
It sent a team of 42 people – its largest such deployment – to Ukraine to investigate crimes that fall within the court’s jurisdiction.
Although Ukraine is not an ICC member, it accepted the court’s jurisdiction for incidents on its territory starting months before Russia seized the country’s Crimea peninsula in 2014.
In addition to war crimes, the ICC is investigating crimes against humanity and genocide. The former are defined as acts such as murder, enslavement, deportation, imprisonment, rape and apartheid when committed as part of a widespread or systematic attack against a civilian population.
Genocide is defined in a 1948 United Nations convention as specific acts intended “to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has accused Russia of genocide, saying Mr Putin intends to end Ukraine’s existence as a nation.
What are the prospects of trying Putin or other Russian officials?
Barring a change of regime in Moscow, not good. The ICC does not permit trials in absentia, and the court is unlikely to get its hands on Mr Putin or his lieutenants.
It relies on its member states to make arrests, and accused Russian officials can always avoid travelling to a country that might turn them over.
Of the two dozen people against whom the ICC has pursued war crimes cases, about a third remain at large. Those charged have been members of armed groups rather than political or state military leaders, with four exceptions – a Libyan general, Sudan’s former president Omar al-Bashir, and two of his ministers – none of whom have been turned over to the ICC.
Numerous political leaders were prosecuted for barbarities in the Balkans and Rwanda, but those tribunals were established by the UN Security Council, where Russia has a veto.
What’s Ukraine’s approach?
With the help of a number of countries, including the United States, Ukrainian officials began collecting evidence of war crimes early in the conflict.
By mid-2023, they had opened 80,000 cases.
In the first trial, a Ukrainian court sentenced a Russian soldier to life imprisonment for killing an unarmed civilian.
In the second, two soldiers were sentenced to 11½ years’ jail for shelling an educational facility.
In a commentary published in The Conversation, Mr Robert Goldman, president of the International Commission of Jurists, said Ukraine’s approach was permissible under international law but arguably not wise.
He noted that the International Committee of the Red Cross has cautioned against holding such trials during hostilities because of the improbability that the accused could properly prepare a defence in that setting.
How have war crimes been prosecuted in the past?
In an early exercise of international criminal justice, Allied powers tried and punished German and Japanese leaders after World War II, sentencing some to death.
Because the Allies granted themselves immunity from war crimes charges, the tribunals were criticised as victors’ justice.
To avoid that conflict of interest, the UN Security Council created independent, international tribunals to prosecute atrocities in the Balkans and Rwanda in the 1990s. Those horrors revived a 19th-century idea of establishing a permanent world court to hold people accountable for acts of mass inhumanity.
The ICC was born in 2002 out of a treaty called the Rome Statute.
Apart from Russia and China, notable non-signatories include India and the US, with the latter saying that putting its citizens under the court’s jurisdiction would violate their constitutional rights. BLOOMBERG
