As the world has born witness over the past week, Vladimir Putin, the President of Russia, is waging a war of choice, an unprovoked war of aggression against its much smaller and not nearly as well-armed neighbor—the sovereign nation of Ukraine—and, in the process, has committed and is continuing to commit war crimes against the Ukrainian people. As the mounting evidence makes clear, Putin is—and for a long time now has been—a war criminal. The International Criminal Court (ICC), which has already begun an investigation of Putin’s dirty war, should charge him as such as soon as possible, and he can and should be held to answer for his crimes.
The ICC, established in 1998 by the Statute of Rome, a multilateral treaty, has jurisdiction to investigate and prosecute genocide (defined as “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”), crimes against humanity (defined as acts “committed as part of a widespread or systematic attack directed against any civilian population, with knowledge of the attack”), war crimes (including “willful killing” and “willfully causing great suffering” of civilians during an armed conflict), and crimes of aggression (defined as “the use of armed force by a State against the sovereignty, territorial integrity or political independence of another State, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Charter of the United Nations”).
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