“This is the first time that a prosecutor at the International Court has traveled to an area where war is taking place”, explained Wednesday April 13 on franceinfo Me Emmanuel Daoud, lawyer at the Paris bar, specialist in international criminal law and registered on the list of lawyers at the International Criminal Court. The prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, who visited Ukraine, estimated during his visit to Boutcha that the country was a “crime scene”.
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franceinfo: How is it going to happen on the ground for the prosecutor?
Emmanuel Daoud: This is the first time that a prosecutor at the International Court has traveled to an area where war is taking place. This is remarkable and shows how much the International Criminal Court and its prosecutor are committed to collecting evidence of war crimes and crimes against humanity. We’re going to have ballistics experts, forensic doctors, who are going to autopsy the bodies of Boutcha civilians to find out if they were executed, if it’s Russian bullets that are found in these bodies. Then, they will establish, village by village, city by city, the cartography of these abuses and these crimes. Once this has been established, investigators and the prosecutor will attempt to work their way up the chain of command.
Is it important to be there as quickly as possible? Will the evidence be hard to find?
It is absolutely necessary and essential since we see that on the Russian side, we talk about staging on the Ukrainian side. The fact that there may be not only ICC investigators but also a team of French gendarmes, who work in the service of the General Prosecutor of Ukraine, shows that on the ground, there is expertise which allows real time to gather this evidence. This is the first time, to my knowledge, that this has happened. What will be the result? I bet that it will be much faster than in criminal proceedings of this type concerning other theaters of war or other crimes against humanity.
“I think there will be arrest warrants issued against the alleged perpetrators of these war crimes in two to three years and not in seven or ten years.”
Me Emmanuel Daoud, lawyer at the Paris Barat franceinfo
What is the legal difference between war crime and genocide that some politicians have talked about?
A war crime is to bomb maternities, theaters, buildings knowing that there are civilians and without there being identified armed forces next to these buildings. These are war crimes. Between the war crime and the genocide, there is the crime against humanity where we are in larger geographical areas and the systematic deliberate desire to strike civilian populations. For a genocide, it is necessary that on the Russian side, the demonstration is made that one wanted to eradicate, to eliminate, the Ukrainian nation. So you need a will, a concerted plan to eliminate as many Ukrainians as possible. Will this demonstration be done? I do not know. The fact that there are strikes on a large part of the territory, that there is a concerted plan of bombardments of places where there are civilian populations, executions, leads us more and more to the war crime towards crimes against humanity and genocide.