Nobel laureate wants more to help investigate Russian war crimes
BRUSSELS – A Ukrainian human rights lawyer who shared last year’s Nobel Peace Prize on Thursday called for more international investigation and legal aid to deal with the staggering number of crimes of war since Russia invaded its neighbor nearly a year ago.
Oleksandra Matviichuk, of the Ukrainian Center for Civil Liberties, told a session of the 46-nation Council of Europe, the continent’s leading human rights organization, that Ukraine had documented some 31,000 potential war crimes cases since the February 24, 2022 invasion.
But the overabundance of work the process entailed prevented the justice system from dealing with most of them properly, Matviichuk said.
“The war turned people into numbers. The scale of war crimes is becoming so large that it has become impossible to recognize all the stories,” she said, insisting that it remained essential to give each individual a sense of the justice served. .
Allegations of war crimes against Russians involve the rape, torture and murder of innocent civilians, forced deportations, child abductions and the destruction of churches, schools and hospitals, the human rights lawyer.
“I work with people who survived hell,” Matviichuk continued, “and I’m sure that beyond their own lives, their ruined families, their ruined vision of the future, these people yearn to restore their confidence that justice exists, even if delayed in time.”
The United Nations human rights office said that as of January 23, 7,068 civilians had been killed in the war.
While Ukrainian officials have called for modern tanks and advanced weaponry to bolster their nation’s defense, Matviichuk wants a similar effort to bolster its legal capabilities. “We need to integrate international elements at the level of national investigation and national justice,” she said.
She called on the Council of Europe to help set up a system where more international investigators and judges could be brought in to strengthen Ukraine in the prosecution.
In October, Matviichuk’s organization, the Center for Civil Liberties, was named co-winner of the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize along with the Russian human rights group Memorial and Ales Bialiatski, leader of the Belarusian rights group Viasna rights.
In her impassioned speech Thursday in the hall of the Council of Europe, she also regretted with a trembling voice that the International Criminal Court concentrates on a few cases and has no jurisdiction over the crime of aggression, for which many members of the international community want Russian President Vladimir Putin and other senior Kremlin officials prosecuted.
The European Parliament and the European Union’s executive board have called for the establishment of a tribunal to prosecute the crime of aggression, and Matviichuk urged the Council of Europe to play a leading role there as well.
Something has to happen soon, she said, because as a legal expert she has only one answer to her country’s predicament: “Supply Ukraine with modern weapons because now the law does not work.
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