Justice for the Russian aggression against Ukraine: side event at Warsaw Human Dimension Conference

Human Rights Centre ZMINA in cooperation with Ukraine 5 AM Coalition holds a side event “Role of Ukraine and the International Community in Ensuring Justice for the War in Ukraine” at the Warsaw Human Dimension Conference in Królewski meeting room on October 12 at 14:00 CEST.

Photo credit: Beyond the Horizon

Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine is accompanied by numerous grave international crimes on a daily basis. The scale of the violations and the suffering they caused has become an unprecedented challenge not only for Ukraine’s national system but also for the international justice system as a whole.

The response to this challenge was tremendous support for justice and accountability efforts from many countries around the world. Initiation of an investigation at the ICC and financial support for the Court’s work on Ukraine; resource, technical and expert support for the work of justice agencies, participation in discussions on the establishment of special justice and accountability mechanisms, compensation mechanisms; participation in joint investigation teams; investigations under the universal jurisdiction mechanism.

At the same time, a year and a half after the full-scale invasion and nine years since the beginning of the armed conflict, the architecture of conflict-related justice in Ukraine still has significant gaps both at the level of the regulatory framework and in the more practical dimension. This makes its capacity insufficient to respond to the challenges of providing justice for victims of the armed conflict both in Ukraine and in other situations around the world. The Rome Statute, which has not been ratified by Ukraine, the lack of an adequate national legislative framework, as well as of a strategic vision of priorities, coupled with other factors remain fundamental obstacles.

This event aims to outline the main challenges inherent in the existing efforts to build a conflict-related justice architecture in Ukraine and how Ukraine and international partners can strengthen them to achieve the common goal of restoring the rights of victims and bringing perpetrators of grave crimes to justice.

The discussion will be built around the following issues:

• What does the current justice architecture look like and what are the existing gaps?
• What affects the impactfulness of international assistance to Ukraine in the area of conflict-related justice?
• What is needed to build an effective justice architecture?
• Under what conditions ensuring justice for the war in Ukraine would also strengthen the international justice system as a whole?

Panelists:

• Arie Mora, Ukrainian Legal Advisory Group
• Roman Romanov, International Renaissance Foundation
• Alena Lunova, Human Rights Centre ZMINA
• Lyubov Smachylo, Media Initiative for Human Rights
• Roman Yedeliev, Associate Professor of Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv, PhD