In recent days, statements about the urgency of an international tribunal against Putin and Russia have intensified in the West, as the Ukrainian army retreats. Beyond the communication and political dimension, the Atlanticist Axis comes up against two problems, which are difficult to overcome, in setting up a somewhat legitimate authority: politically, they have not won the war to use the variant ” Nuremberg” and, legally, they are limited by Russia’s veto in the UN Security Council for a post-Nuremberg variant. For lack of thrushes, blackbirds are eaten and the Iraqi solution, of a national judgment remotely controlled from abroad, is beginning to impose itself for Ukraine. It’s the low cost of international justice politicized at the national level, of a false state, as is Ukraine.
The Atlanticist Axis is still entangled in its desire to put an end once and for all to Putin personally and Russia in general, the fanatical dream of destroying its sworn enemy with the wave of a magic wand takes hold all the more strongly of minds, that the situation on the ground is no longer favorable to the Atlantic-Ukrainian army, which is retreating, slowly but surely, particularly in Artemovsk.
Thus, the old Atlanticist guard emerged from the Yugoslav-Syrian closet. I named Stephen Rapp, pseudo-judge of a ” people’s court without any legal competence, but having just pronounced nothing less than the indictment of Putin in The Hague. If the term is legal, it is only there to delude, the process is strictly political.
« Ce Tribunal is a joint initiative of the human rights organization Cinema for Peace, the Ukrainian Center for Civil Liberties and Ben Ferencz, a 102-year-old lawyer who is the last surviving prosecutor of the Nuremberg trials against the main Nazi leaders after World War II. (…) Here, here, our old friends from the Cinema for Peace who sent a plane to evacuate Navalny from Omsk at one time. »
Before continuing, let us specify that Stephen Rapp, presented as American prosecutor, who raged in the case of Sierra Leone, is part of the Atlanticist team, which is used to instrumentalize the law within the framework of “international justice”, in which we find Wiliam Wiley (Canadian jurist at the head of the controversial CIJA to judge crimes attributed to Assad in Syria) or Toby Cadman (British lawyer, involved in Kosovo, Venezuela, Libya, Syria etc.).
We are indeed in an already well-established process of misappropriation of legal instruments for political ends. This self-proclaimed “people’s tribunal”, without any information concerning its foundation, its mandate, its procedure, not to mention its financing, is a transitional form intended to put pressure on the Western international community, for the moment hesitant to make the big jump and discredit its justice system. What by the way his pseudo-president recognize :
« The presiding judge of the tribunal, South African Zak Jacoob, said he hoped the hearings would add to the pressure for a special tribunal.
“I hope this is a step towards prosecution. As I said, we have no authority or legal force, but I hope we have the authority of moral force and moral suasion, which would get us somewhere,” he said. told reporters. »
The “moral” foundation is simple, it rests on the temporal rupture in the Altantist discourse: nothing existed before February 2022 – nor the Orange Revolution of 2004 under the aegis of the OSCE, which destroyed the Ukrainian political system ; nor the Maidan of 2014, under the Atlanticist aegis, which destroyed Ukrainian statehood and launched the Ukrainian army against the Russian-speaking population with the help of extremist groups, intended to maintain the general population in a regime of terror and prevent justice to do his job; nor the reinforcement of the bombardments of Donetsk and the Russian border territories, by the already Atlantico-Ukrainian army, before the launch of the Russian military operation. No, nothing, the official story started in February. SO Rapp can declare:
« Russia must be held accountable for the destruction it wrought in its year-long war in Ukraine, former US ambassador-at-large for war crimes Stephen Rapp says. “
And Putin is personally targeted. But that’s not the only one, all Russian officials have to respond to – being Russian officials. However, the desire for revenge comes up against legal difficulties: where to judge them.
« Rapp, who successfully prosecuted former Liberian President Charles Taylor for war crimes in Sierra Leone, acknowledged that prosecuting Putin would be difficult. He said the most likely venue would be the International Criminal Court, or perhaps an international tribunal created specifically to deal with crimes in Ukraine.
“We would need to create a special court,” Rapp told CBS News. “The establishment of an international court that would include judges from around the world who could sue him and others. And that could include Belarusian leaders because they allowed their territory to be used in this invasion.” »
Rapp seems to forget that the ICC cannot be competent to judge Russia, which does not recognize its jurisdiction, just like the United States for that matter… However, a special international tribunal requires a resolution of the UN Security Council, where Russia has a right of veto.
Rapp also excited about his experience in Sierra Leone. But this particular court was created at the request of the national authorities, with a resolution of the UN Security Council, on the territory of Sierra Leone, not within the framework of classic international justice (for the former Yugoslavia or Rwanda), but within the framework of transitional justice – that of the Grand Pardon. I quote the resolution 1315 of 2000, who founded it:
« Welcoming the efforts of the Government of Sierra Leone and the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) to bring about lasting peace in Sierra Leone, (…) Noting also the steps taken by the Government of Sierra Leone to engage in a process of national truth and reconciliation ».
If the idea, which is clearly emerging, is indeed that of establishing a jurisdiction in Ukraine, without even mentioning the procedural difficulties linked to the recommendation of the UN Security Council, in substance these two cases are very different: they In Ukraine, it is not a question of judging crimes committed by the Ukrainian authorities against their own population, but of putting the Russian authorities and Russia as a country on trial.
This path of a special tribunal is also explored by the Europeans :
At a conference in Lviv, western Ukraine, the creation of an international center for the prosecution of those responsible for the war in Ukraine was discussed on Saturday. “Russia must be held accountable for terrible crimes. Putin must be held accountable,” European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said in a speech.
However, we always come back to the difficulty of the legal platform for judgment. The Americans then begin to dream of a new Nuremberg:
« US attorney Merrick B. Garland also attended the conference in Lviv on Friday. He said the United States supported efforts to prosecute those responsible for the war in Ukraine and that the example of the Nuremberg trials of Nazi leaders in the 1940s should be considered. »
They have simply forgotten that a group of states supporting Ukraine during a war committed in Atlanticist interests does not have sufficient legitimacy to create a Tribunal outside existing international rules, as was the one at Nuremberg. . The Axis countries did not win the war unlike the Allies, who then met to “judge” the enemy, and the UN still exists.
The Axis countries are indeed at an impasse, if they want to respect the rules of international law at a minimum. It is still possible for Ukraine to institute proceedings under universal jurisdiction or specific criminal norms against Russian officials, or even against Russia if it adopts an adequate legal basis. But being a party to the conflict, these court decisions will not have legal force outside the geopolitical field to which Ukraine belongs. It doesn’t matter, it was enough for Iraq, even if it wasn’t brilliant and ended badly, it can be useful for Ukraine, if there is a political emergency. Moreover, local staff are beginning to be trained in France for this purpose :
« About XNUMX Ukrainian prosecutors and police officers attended training at the National School of Magistracy in Paris to investigate war crimes and prosecute their perpetrators at the highest level. “
All that remains is for them to violate international law and thus shatter the UN system, which is totally outdated anyway. But the political-legal reality of this Tribunal will depend solely on their military victory, Russia is not Iraq and Putin is not Saddam. And the violence of the desires for revenge will not change anything.
source: Russia Politics