Posted by IDQWE001 > 2023-03-18 07:48 | Report Abuse

The court has issued arrest warrants for the Russian president and another senior official over the forcible deportation of Ukrainian children. The International Criminal Court (ICC) issued arrest warrants for Russian President Vladimir Putin and the country’s children’s rights commissioner, Maria Lvova-Belova, over allegations that Ukrainian children have been deported from occupied territories to Russia, which could constitute a potential war crime. The existence of the warrants was made public in the interest of justice and in a bid to deter future crimes, ICC President Piotr Hofmanski said in an announcement on Friday, but the details of the allegations remain under seal to protect the victims. Although individual Russian soldiers have been found guilty of war crimes in Ukrainian courts, the warrants represent the first international charges to be brought against senior Russian officials since its invasion of Ukraine last February. At least 6,000 Ukrainian children are thought to have been held in a vast system of camps and other facilities in Russian-occupied Crimea and within Russia itself, according to a report released last month by researchers at the Yale School of Public Health. Some have been singled out for reeducation to make them more pro-Russian, according to the report, while others have been put up for adoption or placed with foster families in Russia—in a move that the researchers concluded could constitute a potential war crime under the Geneva Conventions. Lvova-Belova, Russia’s children’s rights commissioner, claimed to have adopted a teenage boy from the besieged Ukrainian city of Mariupol. “This is a strong signal to the whole world, not just a political statement but a legal statement, that Putin is a suspected war criminal and whoever decides to deal with him will know about this fact,” said Oleksandra Matviichuk, head of the Kyiv-based Center for Civil Liberties, which won the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize.