Prosecutors investigating war crimes cases in Ukraine are examining allegations of the forcible deportation of children to Russia since the invasion as they seek to build a genocide indictment, the country’s top prosecutor said in an interview.
International humanitarian law classifies the forced mass deportation of people during a conflict as a war crime. "Forcibly transfering children" in particular qualifies as genocide, the most serious of war crimes, under the 1948 Genocide Convention that outlawed the intent to destroy - in whole or in part - a national, ethnic, racial or religious group.
Russia's TASS state news agency on Monday quoted an unnamed law enforcement official as saying that "more than 1.55 million people who arrived from the territory of Ukraine and Donbas have crossed the border with the Russian Federation. Among them, more than 254,000 children." "To this day we don't have access to territory. We don't have access to people who we can ask, who we can interview," she said. "We are waiting when this territory will be de-occupied."
However, some legal scholars have said there is mounting evidence to support a genocide case in Ukraine against Russian perpetrators, including a pattern of atrocities that can help meet the rigorous standard required to prove a specific genocidal intent. Officials in Ukraine have said its courts will be working at full capacity to handle possibly hundreds of war crimes cases and the idea is to pass the bigger ones to the ICC. The international tribunal has experts with experience in prosecuting such complex cases and has a remit to step in when national legal systems need assistance.
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