International legal consequences of the war in Ukraine for russia
Valeriia Kolomiiets
Deputy Minister of Justice of Ukraine for European Integration
When will the tribunals against the russians guilty of the war begin; when and how russia will start paying for the war?
The topic of creating a special tribunal for representatives of the russian federation, who are to blame for starting the war in Ukraine, is constantly raised in our society.
On November 30, the President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, claimed that the EU proposes to create a specialized court with the support of the UN for investigation and prosecution crime of russian aggression. Subsequently, one of the first countries to support this initiative was France. This initiative was also supported by the Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe and the European Parliament. Therefore, I am sure, we can unequivocally say that the Tribunal will be in the near future.
I also want to remind you about the landmark decision that was made regarding the compensation mechanism at the UN. Prior to that, there was a similar decision of the Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe. It was stated there both about compensations and about the creation of a tribunal as we have no other option to bring russian political establishment to justice.
Unfortunately, it has not been set specific timeframes yet, because absolutely everything in the international politics is based on too many factors and requires a lot of preparatory work. Undoubtedly, as we can observe, both stories will be put into practice in the near future, in particular, due to the active work of my colleagues – Iryna Mudra, also the Deputy Minister of Justice of Ukraine, and Anton Korynevych, the Ambassador-at-Large of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine, who have been promoting this initiative on the international arena for more than a month by cooperating with each state and intergovernmental organization separately.
Our international partners provide Ukraine with financial support, which we are very grateful for. It must should be clear that they are interested in making the compensation mechanism work, because if they have frozen russian assets worth billions of dollars, why should these countries pay, relatively speaking, from their own pockets?
That is we boldly declare that the terrorist country terrorizes the entire democratic civilized world, and at the same time we are afraid of applying more progressive international legal instruments to it. We need a snow avalanche effect in this matter, but it seems that the first snowflakes have already fallen.
I want to say that I am quite optimistic about the creation of the International Tribunal and the launch of the compensation mechanism.
Moreover, I am certain that everything will work out for us. I know how long and selflessly my colleagues have been working on the creation of these legal mechanisms and how much time they have spent on convincing our international partners of the need and legal possibility to apply them. And this is not just any one decision. These are certain paradigm shifts in international law.
We cannot simply take away the frozen assets of the russian federation, since it was necessary to convince the allied countries that this mechanism is one of the possible solutions of this story.
We cannot hold putin and his terrorist accomplices accountable for everything they’ve done – and in this matter there’s also been done a lot of advocacy work as to why it’s important and on time.
However, we see that success is on our side! And even such propagandists as simonyan and skabeyeva changed their rhetoric from “we will take them in three days” to “we must win at any cost, so that there are no reparations and tribunals.” The result is obvious – victory will be ours, reparations and tribunals – theirs.
