Genocide is one of the four crimes prosecuted by the International Criminal Court (ICC) and is generally considered the most serious. The court defines it as “characterized by the specific intention to destroy in whole or in part a national, ethnic, racial or religious group by killing its members or by other means: causing serious physical or mental harm to members of the group. intentionally imposing on the group living conditions that are expected to result in its physical destruction in whole or in part; imposing measures to prevent births within the group; or the violent transfer of children from one group to another. The court, based in The Hague, the Netherlands, has been attacked for the limited number of successful prosecutions: 10, all for war crimes and / or crimes against humanity, and none for genocide. When ICC prosecutor Karim Khan announced in February that he had opened a case against Ukraine, he said there was “a reasonable basis for believing that both alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity have been committed.” According to cases reported on the ICC website, only one person has been charged with genocide, then-Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir, in 2009 for the Darfur conflict. Following a 2003 uprising by predominantly non-Arab rebels, his government armed, trained, and funded groups of Arab nomads to attack villages throughout Darfur, killing, raping, and looting as they went. He has never been tried, having rejected the power of the ICC. Even if Putin, like Bashir, were charged with genocide, he would certainly be ousting the judiciary – Russia withdrew from the ICC in 2016. While the ICC has never prosecuted anyone for genocide, there have been convictions in special courts. Genocide was first introduced as a legal concept in the Nuremberg trials, where 24 Nazis were indicted after Germany surrendered to World War II. It was more than 50 years later, in 1999, that Jean-Paul Akayesu, the mayor of Rwanda, became the first of many people convicted of genocide by the Rwandan International Criminal Court for his involvement in the mass killings of the Rwandan civil war. broke out in the small African nation in 1994. Former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic and former Bosnian Serb commander Ratko Mladic have been convicted of genocide at the UN-backed International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia for the 1995 Srebrenica massacre. If one day such a special court were set up to investigate the war in Ukraine, Putin would likely boycott it as well.
