The International Criminal Court (ICC) issued an arrest warrant for Russian President Vladimir Putin on Friday for the alleged illegal deportation of children from Ukraine to Russia.
The arrest warrant also includes the Russian commissioner for children’s rights, Maria Alekseyevna Lvova-Belova.
It is unlikely that the defendants will be extradited, because the ICC has no powers to detain suspects and can only exercise jurisdiction within the countries that signed the agreement. It is not the case of Russia.
However, the ICC prosecutor, Karim Ahmad Khan, does not consider the process lost.
Those who believe they can “commit a crime during the day and sleep well at night, maybe they should look at history,” he said.
In an interview with the BBC, Khan gave the example of three leaders who nobody thought would end up in The Hague and who were tried by international courts.
Slobodan Milosevic
Former Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic became the first European Head of State to be accused of genocide and war crimes.
He was arrested in 2001 by order of the Serbian Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic, who would later be assassinated (March 13, 2003).
He faced three charges for atrocities committed in Kosovoanother for crimes in Croatia and a third for genocide in Bosnia (1992 and 1995).
Milosevic’s troops left more than 200,000 dead in Bosnia and 2 million homeless, in addition to carrying out an ethnic cleansing of Albanians in Kosovo.
He was also charged with alleged collusion in the massacre of more than 7,000 Muslim men in Srebrenica in July 1995.
Milosevic was found dead in his cell in The Hague on March 11, 2006, before his trial could conclude.
charles taylor
Former Liberian President Charles Taylor has been sentenced to 50 years in prison by a UN-backed war crimes tribunal in The Hague.
Taylor was found guilty of aiding, arming and abetting the rebels. Sierra Leone during the 1991-2002 civil war.
According to the judges, the rebels were responsible for tens of thousands of murders and rapes.
A characteristic atrocity of the rebels who invaded Sierra Leone in the 1990s was chop off limbs with a machete or hatchet.
Taylor was charged with 11 counts, including terror, murder, rape and the use of child soldiers. But the United Nations-backed tribunal found their influence fell short of command responsibility.
The prosecution of the Special Court for Sierra Leone requested a sentence of 80 years in prison, which the defense considered excessive.
In the end, Taylor became the first exhead of state found guilty of war crimes in an international court since the Nuremberg trials against the Nazis.
Charles Taylor is serving his sentence in the UK.
Felicien Kabuga
On August 29, 1998, the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda indicted businessman Félicien Kabuga for genocide.
But the wealthy businessman mocked court prosecutors for more than two and a half decadesusing 28 aliases and powerful connections on two continents to elude capture.
In May 2020, he was finally arrested in Paris.
Prosecutors claim that Félicien Kabuga collaborated with death squads in the massacre of Tutsi and used a radio station to incite hatred against them.
Some 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus were killed in the Rwandan genocide.
Kabuga is accused of creating what prosecutors have described as the most powerful weapon in the execution of genocide: a radio station that was used to mobilize an ethnic groupthe Hutus, so that they would take up arms against the Tutsis.
It is alleged that the radio station broadcast hate messages, describing Tutsis as “cockroaches”.
He is also accused of acquire machetes and supply them to death squads to make kills.
Prosecutors are expected to call more than 50 witnesses in a trial that could last for years.
Survivors of the genocide have called for speedy justice, fearing that he may die on the presumption of innocence.
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