“Never before has international justice been mobilized so quickly” only after suspicions of war crimes by Russian soldiers in Ukraine, underlines Reed Brody, member of the International Commission of Jurists and specialist in the defense of human rights, Friday April 8 on franceinfo. The International Criminal Court (ICC) opened an investigation at the beginning of March, after a week of conflict.
franceinfo: How would you qualify the scenes seen in Ukraine, in Boutcha in particular?
Reed Brody: We are all revolted, outraged by these images of carnage. These are images of war crimes, crimes against humanity, that is to say crimes committed on a large scale or in a systematic way. We are also faced, from the start, with a crime of aggression which is the supreme international crime, an unjustified invasion of another country in violation of the United Nations Charter.
The ICC opened an investigation at the beginning of March. Has it ever mobilized so quickly in a conflict?
Never has international justice been mobilized as quickly as now. The ICC, supported by 41 countries including France, has investigators on site who take testimonies and evidence. We also have 12 countries now, including France too, which are carrying out their own investigation, either in the name of universal jurisdiction which requires certain crimes to cross borders or, as is the case with France, in defense of French citizens who were killed in Ukraine. Above all, there is the Prosecutor General of Ukraine who has opened investigations on his own territory and it is in fact justice that is the most advanced.
Is it difficult to collect evidence in times of war?
Obviously, there are many difficulties. For the witnesses, we have to centralize a little, but there are a lot of videos, there are a lot of objects, ammunition that needs to be studied, insignia, trajectories, there are Russian prisoners, there are Russian messages intercepted because they don’t have a very sophisticated communication system. Yesterday, the German intelligence services published conversations which give the impression that the atrocities perpetrated for example in Boutcha were not random acts or the product of soldiers out of control, but that it was part of the daily life of Russian troops. . We heard, for example, a Russian soldier say “first you interrogate people, then you kill them”. All this new evidence needs to be cross-checked. We also have thousands of Internet users around the world who help to cut videos by looking for different angles. All these elements, it is very important now that we preserve them, that we keep them.
Some countries denounce war crimes in Ukraine but do not support the ICC. Isn’t it paradoxical?
There is a lot of hypocrisy. The United States, for example. The fear of the United States towards the International Criminal Court is precisely that it claims to have the competence to judge nationals of countries which are not members of the ICC. When it investigates the actions of Americans in Afghanistan, away from home, the United States says it cannot because they are not part of the ICC. But they want soldiers from Russia – which is also not part of the ICC – to be investigated for crimes committed in Ukraine. So there is a lot of hypocrisy.
What we want is for this mobilization in favor of the International Court of Justice to become universal. There are many other massacres in the world, in Mali this week, in Yemen, in Palestine, in Ethiopia. We should have the same solidarity, the same awareness for everyone. If we had investigated the same crimes, committed by the same Russian generals in Syria or in Grozny [capitale de la Tchétchénie prise par la Russie en 2000], maybe this war would turn out differently. Even if it takes a year, two years, five years or ten years, impunity must end and those who commit these crimes must be brought to justice.