Ukraine’s Prosecutor General, Andriy Kostin, urged the international community, on Friday 17 February in Brussels, to make a political commitment to the establishment of a special tribunal to try Ukraine's “crime of aggression”.
Such a political commitment would send “a very strong message” to the Ukrainians that justice will be done and to the Russian military and political elites that they will be punished, Mr Kostin said ahead of the first face-to-face meeting of the ‘Freeze and Seize’ Task Force set up by the European Commission to coordinate European efforts to freeze the assets of Russian individuals and entities sanctioned by the EU. He welcomed the work of a core group of “twenty countries” active in this field.
According to Mr. Kostin, there is currently no effective legal mechanism to try the crime of aggression. Russia refuses to make progress in the UN Security Council, it is not a party to the International Criminal Court and the immunity of its political leaders is an additional obstacle.
EU Member States are divided on the nature of a special tribunal, between setting up a purely international court or an entity also based on Ukrainian law, although there seems to be growing support for the former, as advocated by the Commission (see EUROPE 13109/1).
The EU Commissioner for Justice, Didier Reynders, spoke about the ongoing process. The first step is to collect the necessary evidence and initiate discussions between prosecutors. Hence the creation of an International Coordination Centre for the Prosecution of the Crime of Aggression under the auspices of the Eurojust agency, which should be fully operational “starting in July”.
The Commissioner also recalled the work to implement the new criminal offence of circumventing EU sanctions in a uniform manner across the EU (see EUROPE 13076/21). This measure should make it possible to confiscate frozen assets and mobilise them for the reconstruction of Ukraine.
At this stage, the frozen assets in the EU belonging to sanctioned Russians or Russian entities have an estimated value of €21.5 billion. We are working on other assets such as those of the Bank of Russia and frozen transactions, notably at the level of clearing houses like Euroclear, Mr Reynders added.
Mr Kostin says that the EU and Ukraine have the same goal: to make sure that those guilty pay for the crimes committed in Ukraine, those on the battlefield and also the Russian political leaders who ordered the military aggression against Ukraine.
While the EU is considering mobilising the interest generated by the frozen assets rather than the capital, which would be returned after negotiations on possible compensation, the Prosecutor General of Ukraine has instead advocated for confiscating “ Russia’s sovereign assets”, as it was Russia that committed the act of aggression against its neighbouring country. Asked whether Switzerland doubted the possibility of confiscating the assets it had frozen, he said he hoped that the Swiss Confederation would hear the Ukrainian position and change its stance. (Original version in French by Mathieu Bion)