- Reacting to the order the Russian Foreign Ministry dismissed the announcement.
The Pre-trial Chamber of the International Criminal Court (ICC), on Friday issued warrants for the arrest of Russian President Vladimir Putin and Maria Lvova-Belova, the presidential commissioner for children’s rights.
The Hague-based tribunal is not recognised by Moscow, and the move has no legal validity in Russia. The US also does not recognise the body, which has been accused of being Eurocentric and biased towards the West.
Reacting to the order the Russian Foreign Ministry dismissed the announcement.
Spokeswoman for the Ministry, Maria Zakharova, took to her Telegram dried the announcement. She wrote: “The decisions of the International Criminal Court do not matter to our country, including from a legal point of view.”
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov also reacting described the warrant arrest as outrageous and unacceptable, RT reports.
Peskov stated, “We consider the very premise outrageous and unacceptable. Russia, like many other states, does not recognize the jurisdiction of this court. Accordingly, any of its pronouncements are null and void to the Russian Federation from the legal standpoint.”
Senator Andrey Klishas, a senior member of the ruling United Russia party, called the announcement “absurd,” saying the ICC is putting itself on the road to self-destruction.
The ICC alleged that Putin and Lvova-Belova engaged in the “unlawful deportation of population (children) and that of unlawful transfer of population (children) from occupied areas of Ukraine to the Russian Federation.”
Thousands of residents of Donetsk, Lugansk, Zaporozhye, and Kherson – four regions that overwhelmingly voted to join Russia last September – have been evacuated to the interior of Russia due the deliberate shelling of civilians by Ukrainian forces, often using NATO-supplied weapons.
The court claims that Putin and Lvova-Belova bear individual and command responsibility for the alleged crime under several articles of its establishing treaty, the Rome Statute. As Zakharova noted, however, Russia never ratified the statute and is not under the ICC’s jurisdiction.
Neither is the US, which has championed Ukraine’s claims of Russian “war crimes.” The US Congress adopted a law in 2002 prohibiting any Americans from cooperating with the ICC, or extradition of US citizens for trial there. The American Service-Members’ Protection Act (also known as The Hague Invasion Act), also authorized “all means necessary and appropriate” to release any detained Americans – or their allies – from the Hague.
The ICC was modelled after the ad-hoc tribunal for war crimes in the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), which relied on NATO countries to fund its investigations and trials, and enforce its warrants and verdicts.
Meanwhile, neither Russia nor Ukraine have ratified the Rome Statute that established the ICC. The US, which underwrote the tribunals for Yugoslavia and Rwanda on which the ICC was based, adopted a law authorizing a military invasion of the Netherlands if any American is ever detained by the court.