Attachments
by Claudia Marconi and Júlia Lira
Since Vladimir Putin announced a “special military operation” to be undertaken on February 24th, 2022, in the Donetsk and Luhansk territories, the War in Ukraine has been on high alert by the international community, especially given the escalation of violence and multiple civilian vulnerabilities entailed. According to the United Nations (UN) – which classifies the situation as an international armed conflict under the 1949 Geneva Convention – the conflict has resulted in the displacement of around eight million Ukrainian refugees around Europe and more than five million internally displaced individuals within Ukraine. These numbers constitute the largest displacement of human populations in Europe since World War II (UN 2023).
Especially regarding the intense forced displacement context embedded in the offensive and its complexities, international public opinion has attached importance to the arrest warrant requests made by the International Criminal Court (ICC) against both the Russian President, Vladimir Putin, and the Russian Commissioner for Children’s Rights, Maria Lvova-Belova, on March 2023. They have been formally accused of “[…] criminal responsibilities for the illegal deportation and transference of Ukrainian children to Russian-occupied territories and to Russian Federation”, which, according to the 8th Article of the Court’s institutionality, configures as a “war crime”:
8a. VII) The illegal deportation or transfer, or the illegal privation of liberty”; and “8b. VIII) The transfer, directly or indirectly, by the Occupying Power of parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies, or the deportation or transfer of all or parts of the population of the occupied territory to within or outside this territory (Rome Statute 1998).
The ICC also argues that, throughout the conflict, the Russian Federation has developed mechanisms that stretch and challenge the boundaries of Russian Law to allow Ukrainian children deported from orphanages, residential schools, hospitals and other care institutions to be adopted by Russian families. The Court highlights that the deportations are part of a series of practices and acts of aggression taken by Russia against the sovereignty and integrity of Ukrainian territory since 2014 (ICC 2023) and inflict serious and multidimensional harm on children.
Complaints have been made by Ukraine since May 2022 and vocalized by the Ukrainian Commissioner of Human Rights, Lyudmyla Denisova, who claims the forced deportation of 1.2 million Ukrainians, including 210,000 children (Deutsch and Van der Berg 2022). Besides, the Ukrainian Presidency Spokeswoman for the Rights and Rehabilitation of Children claimed, in August 2022, that these children are in the situation of “waiting for adoption” by Russian families (Krechetova 2022).
International organizations, both governmental and non-governmental, have been accusing such an exploration of children’s vulnerability as a serious breach of international children’s rights (European Parliament 2022; International Amnesty 2022; UN 2023; UNICEF 2022; Human Rights Watch 2023; Yale Humanitarian Research Lab 2023), as well as advancing the classification of such violent acts and practices as a war crime and, consequently, as a violation of the Rome Statute of 1998, the legal baseline of the ICC.