The Prime Minister of Canada is following in the footsteps of American President Joe Biden by using the word “genocide” to describe the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Posted at 11:46 a.m.
Updated at 11:50 a.m.
What there is to know
- The Prime Minister uses the term “genocide” for the first time.
- President Joe Biden claimed on Tuesday that the Russian invasion was a “genocide”.
- International bodies will make the determination, note the two leaders.
- Canada sent RCMP officers to Ukraine to investigate.
” President [Biden] recognized that there are important international bodies that will make the official determination, but it is certain that we can more and more speak of genocide, ”dropped Justin Trudeau at a press conference in Laval, Wednesday, when asked if he agreed with his counterpart south of the border.
“We have seen atrocities that the Russians, the Russian army, [Vladimir] Putin is committing in Ukraine. We have seen this desire to attack civilians, to use sexual violence as a weapon of war. This is completely unacceptable,” continued the Prime Minister.
He took the opportunity to point out that Canada is one of the countries that have worked to trigger a process at the International Criminal Court to “ensure that Putin is held accountable for his actions, his war crimes”, and that investigators RCMP were sent to Ukraine to “find out the whole truth about what is going on there”.
The day before, the tenant of the White House lamented that “your family’s budget, your ability to fill up your gas, none of this should depend on a dictator declaring war and committing genocide at the other end of the world “.
Later, on board Air Force One, he drove home the point: “Yes, I called it genocide”, noting in particular that “lawyers, at the international level”, will decide on the qualification of genocide, but that in his opinion “it looks like it”.
In Ottawa last Friday, federal MPs and Ukrainian, Jewish and Armenian groups suggested that a parliamentary committee investigate the discovery of dead bodies in Boutcha, northwest of Kyiv.
Liberal MP Ali Ehsassi said the discovery of mass graves in Ukraine should be studied in the Canadian Parliament to establish whether Russia committed genocide.
He called for the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Genocide Prevention, which was inactive during the COVID-19 pandemic, to be reinstated with funding to help it conduct an investigation.
What the UN says
The United Nations defines genocide as the commission of “murder of members of the group”, “serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group”, “deliberately inflicting on the group its physical destruction in whole or in part”, “measures intended to prevent births within the group” and “forcible transfer of children from the group to another group” – one or more of these acts – with the intention “to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such”.
With Agence France-Presse and The Canadian Press