Russia’s leaders must be tried for invading Ukraine, even if they cannot yet be arrested or tried, Ukrainian Prosecutor General Andriy Kostin said in an interview with Reuters on Thursday.
According to him, international support is growing for the idea of creating a special court that will prosecute “the highest political and military leaders, including Putin” for the invasion of Ukraine, which has lasted for more than a year and which Ukraine and Western countries consider a criminal aggression.
“I think that a special court can be held in absentia, because it is important to ensure justice for international crimes, even if the perpetrators are not judged”, underlined the Prosecutor General of Ukraine.
In his opinion, the Special Court for Criminal Assault should conduct trials in absentia.
Kostin met in The Hague with the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC) Karim Khan, who last week issued an arrest warrant for Russian President Vladimir Putin for the war crime of deporting children from Ukraine to Russia.
The powers of the ICC give it the right to prosecute war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide in Ukraine, but it cannot prosecute the crime of aggression (invasion of an independent country) due to legal restrictions.
Trials in absentia are rarely held by international courts, and ICC rules explicitly state that defendants must be present in person at trials.
A recent example of an international trial in absentia was the case in which a UN court convicted three people for the 2005 assassination of Lebanese politician Rafik Hariri.
In November 2022, a Dutch court found three defendants – Russian citizens Igor Girkin and Sergey Dubinsky and Ukrainian citizen Leonid Kharchenko – guilty in the 2014 crash of the airliner MH17 over eastern Ukraine and sentenced them to life imprisonment. None of the defendants was present in court.
