In the midst of the war in Ukraine, Karim Khan, the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC), wanted to strike loud and clear. More than a year after the entry of his tanks into the neighboring country, Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, is targeted by an arrest warrant from the ICC for war crimes. “For the first time, the Court is fulfilling the function assigned to it: to show that there is no impunity for a Head of State who commits crimes”, commented shortly after the announcement a lawyer in The Hague. For several weeks, many have wondered about the prosecutor’s initiatives. Was he going to attack the head of the Kremlin? Aim for the top of the hierarchy? Or start by targeting officers?
The arrest warrant issued by the ICC judges targets the head of state of a nuclear power, who sits on the UN Security Council and is suspected of war crimes for the deportation of Ukrainian children in Russia, and for the forcible transfers of other children to the occupied territories in the east of the country. There is “reasonable grounds to believe that Vladimir Putin is personally responsible for these crimes”, the judges said in a statement. Presumed co-author of these « crimes », the Russian Commissioner for the Rights of the Child, Maria Lvova-Belova, 38, is also under an arrest warrant. They relate to “the deportation of hundreds of children removed from orphanages and homes” in Ukraine, who would then have been “given up for adoption” in Russia, adds the prosecutor in a press release.
Decrees for exhibits
In July, Maria Lvova-Belova publicly encouraged her compatriots to adopt Ukrainian children, telling them that she had herself taken in a teenager from Mariupol, in the Donetsk region, into her family. Moscow claims to be carrying out humanitarian action, intended to protect young Ukrainians. But for the ICC, these acts “demonstrate an intention to permanently remove these children from their own country”. Decrees issued by the Russian president to expedite the granting of Russian citizenship to Ukrainian children, and then their adoption by Russian families, should then become exhibits in a future trial in The Hague, if Vladimir Putin was transferred there.
At this stage, the prosecutor advanced the procedure in the context of a first case which he was certain would arouse strong emotion. “We cannot allow children to be treated as spoils of war,” said Karim Khan. According to the Ukrainian authorities, more than 16,226 children have been deported to Russia since the beginning of the conflict.
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