Former Prime Minister Gordon Brown has urged Western nations to create a special tribunal that will punish Russian President Vladimir Putin for his aggressive invasion of Ukraine.
He made the plea to prosecute Putin and his accomplices at an online event organised by the Chatham House think-tank where he was accompanied by Ukrainian foreign minister Dmytro Kuleb.
Mr Brown said the new international tribunal would take place alongside existing investigations by the International Criminal Court.
He proposes it is modelled around the plan nations made in London during Second World War in response to Nazi was crimes. This led to the creation of the International Military Tribunals and the Nuremberg trials.
Mr Brown said: “Ukraine wants our full support to expose and punish the crime of aggression, and that can be done by setting up a special tribunal on the lines proposed in 1942.
“President Putin has posed a fateful challenge to the post-1945 international order. He has sought to replace the rule of law with a misuse of force.
Russian President Vladimir Putin
SPUTNIK
“If we were to acquiesce in any way, none of us could ever take freedom or democracy for granted ever again.
“For all these reasons, and because of the scale of the suffering of the people of Ukraine, I believe that most people would agree that this act of aggression cannot go uninvestigated, unprosecuted or unpunished.”
The proposal, seeking to address a gap in the international legal infrastructure, has been formulated by formulated by senior international legal experts.
This includes Phillippe Sands QC, director of the Centre on International Courts and Tribunals at University College London; Philip Leach, professor of human rights law at Middlesex University; Dapo Akande, professor of public international law at the Blavatnik School of Government at Oxford University; and Murray Hunt, director of the Bingham Centre for the Rule of Law.
The lawyers are pressuring the UK and its Western alliances to permit jurisdiction to a dedicated criminal tribunal that will investigate Putin for the crime of aggression against Ukraine as well as other perpetrators complicit in that crime.
Mr Brown added: “Currently the ICC can investigate crimes against humanity, genocide and war crimes. As evidence mounts acts against innocent civilians including children and the use of vapour bombs, it may be that Russia can be prosecuted for these crimes.
“But we lack a crucial extra weapon in the legal fight against Putin. because Russia has not signed up to a separate ICC statute under which nations pledge not to commit so-called ‘crimes of aggression’. We need the special tribunal.
“Mr Kuleba wants us to act and I believe we must do so now. Putin must not be able to escape justice.”
