Vladimir Putin hasn’t won the Ukraine war yet and already they’re talking about putting him in the dock. Gordon Brown’s call for the establishment of Nuremberg-style trials, ‘indicting President Putin and his inner circle for the crime of aggression against Ukraine’, is well-meaning and emerges from a sincere Christian socialist worldview. I once termed Brown a ‘moral romantic’ and his Nuremberg proposal is pure moral romanticism. In a world governed by right and wrong, he is obviously right but in the world as it is, fallen and wicked, his plan to bring Putin before an international tribunal is little more than wishful thinking.
Except through some fundamental change in the circumstances of power in Russia (a palace coup, a popular uprising), Putin will never see the inside of an international courtroom. On Wednesday, the International Court of Justice provisionally ordered Russia to ‘immediately suspend’ its military operations in Ukraine. Unsurprisingly, Russia did not comply. Ukraine creatively used the Genocide Convention to bring Moscow before the ICJ but, even if the court decides it has jurisdiction and even if it ultimately rules against Russia, it is not clear how its final judgment would be any more enforceable than its preliminary one.
The United Kingdom and 40 other state parties to the Rome Convention have referred the situation to the International Criminal Court. Concluding there was ‘a reasonable basis to believe that both alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity have been committed’, chief prosecutor Karim Khan has opened an investigation. Ukraine is not a state party and Russia withdrew in 2016 after the ICC called its presence in Crimea an ‘ongoing occupation’; however, Ukraine placed itself under the Court’s jurisdiction ‘for an indefinite duration’ in 2015.
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