WARRANT ISSUED FOR PUTIN'S ARREST, BUT WILL HE EVER FACE TRIAL?

South Africa recognises the ICC, so will be expected to arrest the Russian President on arrival at the BRICS summit.

- JOHN DOBSON

Just days after details of the abduction of Ukrainian children to Russia were published by this newspaper, the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for President Vladimir Putin and Maria Lvova-Belova, the country’s commissioner for children’s rights. Both are accused of responsibility for illegally deporting children from occupied areas of Ukraine, which is a war crime over which the court has jurisdiction. The warrants had initially been secret, but the court said it was making them public to raise awareness of the continuing crimes.

This was the first time the global court, born in 2002 out of a treaty called the Rome Statute, has issued a warrant against the leader of one of the five members of the UN Security Council. In a statement issued by the ICC: “Putin is allegedly responsible for the war crime of unlawful deportation of children and that of unlawful transfer of children from occupied areas of Ukraine to the Russian Federation.”

The Kremlin insists that the children taken to Russia are orphans, and therefore have no parents or guardians to look after them—a claim hotly disputed by the thousands of parents desperately trying to find and recover the children stolen from them. But whether or not the children have parents, raising the children of war in another country or culture can be a marker of genocide, an attempt to erase the very identity of an enemy nation. Prosecutors say that as President Putin has expressly supported the adoption, the charge can be tied directly to him. But even Russian law prohibits the adoption of foreign children without the consent of the home country, so Vladimir Putin appears to have broken his own country’s law as well as international law.