The conviction issued on 13 December by a Russian court, in absentia, against nine members of the International Criminal Court (ICC), including Italian judge Rosario Aitala, is a blatant and unacceptable act of retaliation by the Kremlin against international justice.
This decision is a direct response to the arrest warrant lawfully issued by the ICC in March 2023 against Vladimir Putin for crimes against humanity committed in Ukraine. Those crimes include the forced deportation of tens of thousands of Ukrainian children to Russia, carried out with the complicity of the Belarusian authorities and under the direct responsibility of the Russian leadership.
The Kremlin’s initiative is clearly aimed at intimidating and exerting pressure not only on the judges of the International Criminal Court, to whom I wish to express my personal, full, and unwavering solidarity. It is becoming increasingly evident that Moscow seizes every opportunity to attempt—futilely, as demonstrated by the continued European and Western cohesion in support of Ukraine and by the numerous measures undertaken to deliver justice to the victims—to delegitimize international justice and the entire rules-based multilateral system.
This multilateral system of international justice and norms has always been a top priority for the European Union as a whole and for our country’s diplomacy in particular, representing a distinctive and widely respected feature of our foreign policy. The attempt to strike at the International Criminal Court constitutes yet another act of intimidation against the entire international community, and especially against accountability mechanisms for the crime of aggression, war crimes, and crimes against humanity.
This action by Putin and his allies is an attack on the system of values and principles on which Europe is founded—a system that also provides for the establishment of a Special Tribunal with jurisdiction to prosecute crimes committed in Ukraine as a result of Russian aggression, as decided by the Council of Europe last June.
Giulio Terzi