Expected at 7pm, but arriving at 9pm straight from the NATO Summit in The Hague, where he had described his meeting with US President Donald Trump as a “good meeting”, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was cheered as soon as he got out of his car on the forecourt of the Council of Europe in Strasbourg on Wednesday 25 June.
The diplomatic corps, led by the Maltese Presidency of the Committee of Ministers, as well as the Presidents of the European Court of Human Rights and the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, representatives of the statutory bodies and civil servants were all keen to emphasise, by their presence, the historic dimension of Volodymyr Zelensky’s first visit to Strasbourg.
On 25 June, Ukraine, represented by its president, and the Council of Europe, represented by its secretary general, Alain Berset, signed an agreement to set up a Special Tribunal to try the crimes committed by the top political and military leaders who planned and launched Russia’s armed aggression against Ukraine on 24 February 2022, in violation of the United Nations Charter.
This new jurisdiction is likely to investigate leading figures from Russia (“including Vladimir Putin”, Volodymyr Zelensky stressed), Belarus and North Korea.
It complements the work of the International Criminal Court, which has jurisdiction to investigate war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide in Ukraine, but currently has no jurisdiction to examine the crime of aggression due to jurisdictional restrictions applicable to this crime.
The Special Tribunal will fill this gap, according to the Council of Europe.
Validated by the 46 ambassadors of the organisation’s member states, before whom Volodymyr Zelensky and Alain Berset spoke before initialling the official documents, its creation is governed by an “enlarged partial agreement”, which opens its membership to the member states of the Council of Europe, to non-member states around the world and to the European Union.
“Justice takes time”, Volodymyr Zelensky acknowledged, but “we are going to wage the legal war in the most serious way possible”.
“International law must apply to all — with no exceptions, and with no double standards”, said Alain Berset, who described the signing of the agreement as “historic” and said that the creation of the Special Tribunal “must speak louder than the bombs”.
Later that evening, the Ukrainian president addressed the summer plenary session of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe.
“Welcome home”, said Theodoros Rousopoulos, current president of the assembly.
He recalled that the Council of Europe’s commitment to Ukraine had been unwavering since Russia was expelled by the Organisation in March 2022, less than a month after the start of the war.
This firm reaction, unparalleled internationally, was confirmed in May 2023 at the Council of Europe Summit in Reykjavik, where full support for Ukraine and the re-commitment of Member States to human rights and democratic values, which Europe considers to be inalienable, were agreed.
A series of very concrete assistance programmes have followed in the wake of the summit in Reykjavik, as well as the creation of a Register of Damage caused by the war, (which has already received more than 34,000 claims and is being extended with work on a compensation mechanism for such damage) and the creation of this Special Tribunal on the crime of aggression. This was officially requested by Ukraine on 13 May and endorsed the very next day at the annual meeting of the foreign affairs ministers of the 46 member states of the Council of Europe, held in Luxembourg.
The organisation has therefore set itself a course and is maintaining it against a backdrop of increasingly brazen violations of international law and breaches of the rule of law.
This may seem pointless to some, but, as an accredited diplomat at the Council of Europe reminded us, the first legal discussions on the Nuremberg Tribunal took place as early as 1943, when no one would have bet on the collapse of Nazism. (Original version in French by Véronique Leblanc)