Prosecuting Russia will be a long road to take – lawyer
Since the creation of the Convention on the Prevention of the Crime of Genocide, only three such crimes have been proven, bringing the Russian Federation to justice will be a long road to take.
Executive director of the NGO "Regional Press Development Institute" and lawyer, Lyudmila Pankratova, said so on March 14 at the press conference "Prosecuting Russian propagandists who make public calls for the genocide of the Ukrainian people", reports Ukrinform.
"The fact that the crimes of genocide proven by an ICC judge are few shows that Ukraine has a very long way to go in bringing the Russian Federation to justice. Since the very creation of the Convention on the Prevention of the Crime of Genocide, since 1951, only three cases of such crimes have been proven: the Rwandan genocide in 1994, the events in Srebrenica in 1995, and the genocide in Sudan," said Pankratova.
She noted that the definition of genocide provided in the Convention covers a wide range of principles. These include causing serious bodily harm, deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction, imposing measures intended to prevent births, forcibly transferring children of the group to another group, etc.
"These must be crimes committed against a national, ethnic, racial or religious group. In order to establish that the Russian Federation is carrying out a genocide against Ukrainians, it is necessary to prove the state's intention to destroy the Ukrainian nation," the lawyer explained.
Earlier at the same press conference, Alyona Nesterenko, media expert at the Institute of Mass Information (IMI), propaganda and disinformation researcher, said that Russian propagandists were publicly advocating for the genocide of the Ukrainian people, which makes keeping track of their genocidal rhetoric an important element of countering propaganda.
It will be recalled that the PACE resolution "Legal aspects and the human rights aspect of the Russian Federation's aggression against Ukraine" states that the Russia's official rhetoric employed to justify the full-scale invasion and aggression against Ukraine bears signs of public incitement to genocide and may indicate a genocidal intent to exterminate the Ukrainian national group as such, or at least in part.
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