Serious repercussions of the war on the children of Ukraine (Peta Zauril/Getty)
The Ukrainian Prosecutor General said that the investigators in the cases war crimes In her country, they are investigating allegations that children were forcibly deported to Russia during the invasion, as part of an effort to prepare a list accusation of genocide.
Prosecutor, Irina Venediktova, who oversees several war crimes investigations in the Ukraine“We have more than 20 cases of forcible transfer of people” to Russia from different regions across the country since the invasion began on February 24.
“From the early days of the war, we started this case of genocide, and in the midst of the chaos and destruction it caused,” she added. Russian attackFocusing on the transfer of children is the best way to gather the evidence needed to bring the matter under the legal definition of genocide, so this forcible transfer of children is so important to us.”
Forced mass deportation during conflict is classified under international humanitarian law as a war crime. In particular, “forcible transfer of children” constitutes genocide and is the most serious war crime under the 1948 Genocide Convention, which prohibits acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic or religious group.
Venediktova declined to say how many were forcibly removed. However, in mid-May Ukraine’s human rights secretary, Lyudmila Denisova, said that Russia had relocated more than 210,000 children during the conflict, out of more than 1.2 million Ukrainians that Kyiv said had been deported once morest their will.
A Kremlin spokesman did not respond to a request for comment on Venediktova’s comments, nor on figures related to Ukrainians on Russian soil.
Russia has previously said that it provides humanitarian aid to those wishing to flee Ukraine voluntarily, and last Monday, the official Russian news agency “TASS” quoted an official of the law enforcement agency as saying that “more than 1.55 million people who arrived from the territory of Ukraine and Donbas have crossed the border with Russian Federation, including more than 254,000 children.
The Convention on the Prevention of the Crime of Genocide ratified by the United Nations General Assembly in the followingmath of the Holocaust defines five acts that would constitute a crime if committed with genocidal intent: killing members of a group, causing serious physical or mental harm to members of the group, or deliberately subjecting the group to circumstances livelihood whose physical destruction is intended in whole or in part, or the imposition of measures designed to prevent the birth of children within the group, or the forcible transfer of children from the group to another group.
Venediktova explained that investigations aimed at establishing the foundations of a genocide case include the forcible deportation of children, and other actions targeting regions in northern Ukraine, as far as Mykolaiv and Kherson on the southern coast, and that the process of gathering evidence was complicated by the war.
The Prosecutor’s Office said that in addition to the genocide, other alleged war crimes were being investigated in the Kyiv, Kharkiv, Lviv, Sumy and Zhytomyr regions.
Ukrainian officials said they are investigating deliberate targeting of civilians and civilian infrastructure, rape, torture, and extrajudicial killings by Russian forces.
Ukraine has identified more than 600 Russian war crimes suspects and has already begun prosecuting regarding 80 of them, Venediktova said, adding that a small number of them are being held as prisoners of war. It did not say whether any of them were accused of forcible deportation.
Russia has strongly denied that its forces committed war crimes in Ukraine, and in turn accused Ukrainian forces of committing atrocities including mistreatment of prisoners, and Kyiv said it would investigate the allegations of abuse.
Legal experts say that proving genocide charges has strict standards, and that such charges have only been proven in international courts in three conflicts, Bosnia, Rwanda and Cambodia, since their inclusion in humanitarian law.
However, some legal experts said there was mounting evidence to support the case for genocide in Ukraine, including a pattern of atrocities that might meet the rigorous criteria required to prove genocidal intent.
Ukraine officials have said its courts will be fully operational to deal with hundreds of potential war crimes cases, and the goal is to refer major cases to the International Criminal Court, which has experts in dealing with such complex cases and has the power to step in when national legal systems need help.
The International Criminal Court opened its investigation into possible war crimes in Ukraine in early March, but the court’s chief prosecutor, Karim Khan, on Tuesday declined to go into details of the crimes his office would study, saying the court had sent 42 experts, prosecutors and staff to Ukraine, and plans to open office in Kyiv.
War crimes in Ukraine are the focus of domestic investigations, as are 18 countries that apply universal jurisdiction that allows prosecutions of the most serious international crimes anywhere.
(Archyde.com)
