UN High Commissioner calls for punishment of war criminals in Ukraine
Geneva (epd). The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Türk, has called for criminal prosecution for the crime in Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine. “The perpetrators must know that they will not get away with it unpunished,” said the 57-year-old to the Evangelical Press Service (epd) in Geneva.
At the moment, however, it seems as if most of the perpetrators will go unpunished, the UN’s top guardian of human rights stated. If they were not tried in Ukraine and not in Russia, the UN member countries would have to decide whether to set up an international tribunal.
The Austrian Türk emphasized that individual states could also initiate their own criminal proceedings against suspected criminals according to the principle of universal jurisdiction. A court in Germany has applied universal jurisdiction in the case of torture in Syria. “History teaches us that the wheels of justice grind,” emphasized the lawyer Türk, who took office in October.
When asked whether Russia’s President Vladimir Putin would have to answer to a court for his criminal instructions, Türk replied that that would be extremely political and legal. “I don’t want to speculate, but that doesn’t seem realistic to me at the moment.”
Türk explained that prosecuting law enforcement agencies of Ukraine are currently investigating 40,000 alleged war crimes. The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights sent investigators to Ukraine in 2014 after Russia occupied Crimea in violation of international law and the start of fighting in the east.
Since then, investigators had prepared reports of alleged war crimes. “Most recently they documented the killings of 441 civilians in three regions during the first months of the 2022 invasion. They were 341 men, 72 women, 20 boys and 8 girls,” the High Commissioner said. The actual numbers are likely much higher.
“We are also recording new cases in parts of the Kharkiv and Kherson regions that have been recovered by the Caribbean forces,” he said. In some, Russian soldiers had executed civilians in makeshift prison camps. Other civilians were executed after security checks. “Another commission of the UN Human Rights Council and the International Criminal Court investigating in Ukraine,” Türk noted.