War crimes trials on the cards
Ukraine is a crime scene, and the Russians responsible for committing acts of ‘‘unspeakable horror’’ there could face Nuremberg-style war crimes trials, says the head of the United Nations Security Council.
Dame Barbara Woodward’s comments come before a meeting next week in which Karim Khan QC, chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, will present his findings to the council as part of efforts to counter Russian misinformation.
Woodward, the British ambassador to the UN and security council president, will be hoping to signal that perpetrators of atrocities will be brought to justice.
‘‘The question then becomes first of all, ending the war, which is an absolute priority, and then, of course, how we would run the prosecution,’’ she said.
‘‘If Russia is not a party to the Rome statute (which established the ICC), do we need another court, such as in the Nuremberg trials?
‘‘We still have to resolve all of that. But all the people I talk to, including Karim Khan, are absolutely determined to see perpetrators brought to justice.’’
It remains unclear how any suspects would be brought before an international tribunal.
Russian President Vladimir Putin recently honoured the brigade that has been accused of committing war crimes in Bucha, a town near the capital Kyiv where hundreds of civilians have been murdered.
There is also evidence of civilians being targeted in other
parts of the country, with the dead being buried in mass graves.
Mariupol’s city council and an adviser to the mayor said yesterday another mass grave had been found outside the devastated eastern city.
The council posted a satellite photo provided by Planet Labs showing what it said was a mass grave measuring 45m by 25m outside the village of Vynohradne, east of Mariupol, which could hold the bodies of at
least 1000 of the city’s residents.
Earlier this week, satellite photos from Maxar Technologies revealed what appeared to be rows upon rows of more than 200 freshly dug mass graves in the town of Manhush, west of Mariupol.
The discovery of mass graves has led to accusations that the Russians are trying to conceal the slaughter of civilians in the city.
‘‘Our work to date has detailed a horror story of
violations perpetrated against civilians,’’ said Michelle Bachelet, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. She added that allegations of sexual violence had ‘‘increasingly surfaced’’.
Woodward said it was essential to gather evidence of the war crimes being committed.
‘‘There is obviously accountability at the head-ofstate level for directing it, but there is obviously accountability for individual crimes.’’
Under her chairmanship of the security council, the United Kingdom has promulgated a code of conduct to guide investigations of sexual abuse. It is named after Yazidi human rights activist Nadia Murad, who was kidnapped and raped by Islamic State fighters.
Sergiy Kyslytsya, the Ukrainian ambassador to the UN, has questioned whether Russia’s diplomats, including its bombastic permanent representative Vasily Nebenzya, will be prosecuted as well, pointing to the fate of Nazi Germany’s foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop, who was executed at Nuremberg.
Woodward, who arrived in New York in 2020 after serving as Britain’s ambassador to China, said she believed that China would stand by Russia, but ‘‘they are not going to throw their weight in behind Russia to help them win the war in Ukraine. They will just let the thing carry on being messy, I suspect’’.
She accepted that the war had badly damaged the UN. ‘‘This does count as a critical moment in UN history, where a permanent member of the security council has invaded another country with the intention of wiping it off the planet. I think it asks some really existential questions about how we deal with things like that.’’
However, the UN had shown ‘‘that we can work around Russia’’, she said.
In two UN general assembly votes, ‘‘only four countries voted with them. If you really think that a superpower is supported by Belarus, Syria, Eritrea and North Korea - well, go figure’’.