Human rights lawyer Amal Clooney on Wednesday urged the United Nations to hold Russia accountable for its alleged war crimes in Ukraine.
“Ukraine, today, is a slaughterhouse right in the very heart of Europe,” Clooney said during an informal meeting of the UN Security Council in New York.
Clooney is part of an international task force advising Ukraine on its legal options amid the Russian military invasion, now in its third month.
President Biden said that Russian President Vladimir Putin “A criminal of war“Who should it be? They were tried for war crimesAs the atrocities of Moscow’s deadly invasion of Ukraine continue to escalate.
“Putin’s war of aggression is so outrageous that even after repeated warnings about the long criminal record of the United States and Russia, the Ukrainians could not believe that this could happen,” Clooney said. “And still reading the headlines I don’t quite know how to address it.”
Could thousands of children be forcibly deported to Russia? I continued. “Could it be that teenage girls are being raped in the street in front of their families and neighbours? Was the building with the word “children” really bombed? Are civilians today in Mariupol subjected to systematic torture and starvation to death? Unfortunately, the answer is yes.”
The International Criminal Court has officially opened an investigation into possible war crimes in Ukraine a week after the Russian invasion on February 24.
“This is a time when we need to mobilize the law and send it into battle,” ICC prosecutor Karim Khan said at the meeting. “Not on the side of Ukraine against the Russian Federation, or on the side of the Russian Federation against Ukraine, but on the side of humanity.”
Prosecutor’s Office of Ukraine He said this week A total of 8,653 alleged war crimes have been registered with the office. At least 217 children were killed in the war.
On Thursday, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres visited Bucha, Ukraine, where evidence of mass killings of civilians was found after Russian forces withdrew from the city.
According to the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights,At least 2,829 Ukrainian civilians have been killed since the start of the Russian war. But the agency believes the actual death toll is likely to be much higher.
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