Canada can play lead role in war-crimes probe
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Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 04/04/2022 (430 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.
When Russia ceases its war against Ukraine, as it must eventually do, some tribunal will have to hear the accusations of war crimes that are now surfacing and reach a verdict about them. Careful investigation should start now. Canadian Foreign Affairs Minister Melanie Joly should take the lead, if no one else will, to conduct that investigation.
There’s no way of knowing yet what post-war Ukraine will look like. It may be two countries. It may be one country suspended in neutrality between Russia and Europe. Political upheaval may transform the face of Russia, as U.S. President Joe Biden was hinting last week.
In any of these events, the watching world will need to know the truth about atrocities that have been reported. According to reporters and news agencies on the ground in Ukraine, Russian forces have starved and abused civilians in the besieged port city of Mariupol and killed many who sought to flee. Hospitals and residential districts in several cities have been shelled and bombed.
Most recently, Ukrainian forces entering the Kyiv satellite city of Boucha as the Russian forces retreated found corpses of civilians in the streets, some with hands tied behind them and gunshot wounds in the back of their heads. The mayor of Boucha reported the discovery of a mass grave containing nearly 300 bodies.
The Russian government may also have atrocities to report. If these seem credible, they too should be investigated.
The watching world deserves to know who did these things and to impose suitable penalties. Russia will of course use its United Nations Security Council veto and its threats of nuclear war to obstruct any inquiry that could implicate its forces in atrocities. That is not a reason to look the other way. It is a reason to investigate carefully so justice may be done.
According to reporters and news agencies on the ground in Ukraine, Russian forces have starved and abused civilians in the besieged port city of Mariupol and killed many who sought to flee.
Who better than Canada to take the lead? Plenty of Canadians have the training, legal knowledge and investigative skills to gather evidence while the blood stains are still visible on the pavement. If some better qualified country or agency steps forward, well and good. Canada could make its crime scene sleuths available to a well-structured investigation organized by someone else.
What Canada must not do is shrug its shoulders and dismiss the atrocity reports as sad but inevitable side-effects of international conflict. The atrocity reports that have been published, if true, show a level of cruelty and brutality that cannot be tolerated.
What Canada must not do is shrug its shoulders and dismiss the atrocity reports as sad but inevitable side-effects of international conflict. The atrocity reports that have been published, if true, show a level of cruelty and brutality that cannot be tolerated.
The UN Security Council in 1993 organized a special tribunal to deal with atrocities committed during the breakup of former Yugoslavia, with the result that numerous offenders were arrested, tried and imprisoned. Since Russia still wields a UN veto, the UN as currently structured is unlikely to repeat the exercise in this case, but the countries that still wish to uphold international law might find a way to proceed without Russian consent.
The countries that defeated Nazi Germany in 1945 formed themselves into the United Nations and dictated terms to defeated Germany, including the Nuremberg war crimes trials. The North Atlantic alliance countries that are inflicting economic sanctions on Russia in order to stop its aggression against Ukraine might become the corresponding group that could eventually form a new kind of United Nations, free of the Russian veto and able to oppose Russian atrocities.
The first step, however, is to gather the facts. Ms. Joly should start that work while the wider issues are being sorted out.
