Carlo Nicolato March 19, 2022
The war in Ukraine could also end in a relatively short time, an agreement to end the invasion will be found sooner or later as long as everyone gives up something. But the life and death struggle between the West and Russia is not, it is just beginning. Unless the unthinkable happens, like a power collapse in Moscow or the sudden death of Putin, there’s no chance of things “going back to the way they were,” or rather, to the way they’ve never really been since reckoning lay for decades in the air. One of the reasons for this impossibility to normalize relations with Moscow is precisely the fact that the US and its allies now consider the Russian President a war criminal for all the reasons in the world. If we think of those that have been considered as such throughout history since the legal case was shaped after World War II, from the Nuremberg and Tokyo trials to the various ones Milosevic, Karadzic and Mladic, it is evident that in no case has there ever been a back-down and all of the accused have paid for their crimes. However, declaring someone a war criminal is not a judgment based on viewpoints, even though the “winner” of a conflict obviously never goes to trial, think of the US that used the atomic bomb in Japan.
In theory, there are precise, objective canons, there’s a pre-established process to follow, and definitions to strictly adhere to. The term applies in general to anyone violating so-called international humanitarian law, or that set of norms of international law relating to the protection of victims of armed conflict. By this last definition we mean all the people who are not taking part in the fighting or who have stopped taking part, that is, civilians, but also the wounded, sick, shipwrecked, prisoners and detainees. Cultural heritage and environment have also recently been included in this category. Other protocols attached to the Geneva Convention also consider war criminals those who use weapons banned by the Convention, such as chemical or biological weapons. A war criminal is anyone who intentionally kills civilians or imprisons them in prison camps, who knowingly destroys non-military targets, who uses disproportionate force those who wreak havoc and massacres, those who use human shields, those who take hostages, those who kill or torture prisoners.
RESPONSIBILITY
A war criminal is also anyone who rapes prisoners or civilians or turns them into sexual slavery. There are also varying degrees of accountability related to war crimes, from committing Chili personally to ordering Chili, including Chine, who is aware and, because of the role he plays, is able to do so. it does nothing to stop them. The Putin case is precisely that of the supreme commander directly ordering certain actions or allowing certain crimes to be committed which he could stop with a single call back. The deliberate killings of civilians these days, think for example of the video in which the tank crushes a speeding car, the bombing of hospitals, that of the Mariupol Theater, although children were reported in it, are already sufficient because Putin and his collaborators to stand trial for war crimes.
But how could the Russian President be persecuted practically? Industry experts point out four different ways, but none of them are secure and automatic. On the one hand by the International Criminal Court, whose jurisdiction concerns the so-called “crimina iuris gentium”, ie genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes. The second route is through the United Nations, which is physically impractical as Russia is one of five permanent members with a binding veto right. The third is by a court created ad hoc by states interested in punishing Putin, as happened for Nuremberg. The last possibility is that there is a specific country that has laws that allow for such a process, like Germany, but not Italy.