The Office of the President said that the creation of a tribunal for the crime of aggression is not a matter of the war in Ukraine, but of the maturity of the entire civilized world, which it lacked in 2008, when Russia came with aggression to Georgia, and in 2014, when Russia came to Crimea and the east. Latvian President Egils Levits agreed with the statement and noted the country’s readiness to support the move.
He noted this during a panel discussion at the 17th Yalta European Strategy meeting in Kiev.
He reminded that the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court are already working on the crime of genocide. And Latvia supported this lawsuit against Russia.
However, according to him, it is necessary to create a special tribunal to bring the Russian leadership to justice for the crime of aggression against Ukraine.
There are already precedents of such tribunals in the world: Yugoslavia, Rwanda, Cambodia, Sierra Leone. The most realistic way to create such a tribunal, in my opinion, is to sign an international treaty between the countries that support this idea. We are ready to sign such a treaty,” Levits explained.
In his turn, Prosecutor General Andriy Kostin said that a tribunal against the Russian leadership is not just the desire of the political leadership of Ukraine, but the request of the entire Ukrainian society.
The British lawyer and prosecutor in the case of Slobodan Milosevic, Geoffrey Nice, stated that the Ukrainians had become victims of a terrible crime – Russian aggression.
The fact that the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court does not cover the crimes of aggression, he called absurd and a relic of the past. However, the lawyer is convinced that this should not prevent the international community from fully bringing Putin to justice.
Nice stressed that the creation of a special tribunal is the right thing to do.