Three days after the international arrest warrant issued against Vladimir Putin by the International Criminal Court (ICC), Russia decided to retaliate by opening a criminal investigation against the prosecutor and three judges of the court based in The Hague in the Netherlands .
A counter-investigation and a press release to denounce “the illegal decisions” of the ICC aimed at “arresting” Vladimir Putin and “the Commissioner for Children’s Rights”. Moscow opened this Monday, March 20, a criminal investigation against the ICC prosecutor, Karim Khan, and three judges of the international body, three days after his arrest warrant targeting Vladimir Putin for the illegal “deportation” of children in Ukraine.
Karim Khan, the ICC prosecutor, is thus targeted on the grounds of having “initiated criminal proceedings against a notoriously innocent person, combined with the unlawful accusation of having committed a serious or particularly serious crime” , as well as “preparing an attack on a representative of a foreign state”.
Vladimir Putin is accused by the ICC of war crimes for the “deportation” of thousands of Ukrainian children in the context of the conflict between Moscow and kyiv.
If Volodymyr Zelensky called this decision “historic” and Joe Biden “justified”, Moscow derided it as “null and void”, because Russia is not a member of the ICC and therefore does not recognize not the jurisdiction of this court, according to Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov.
According to the Russian Investigative Committee, “criminal prosecution is obviously illegal, since there is no ground for criminal liability”. He indicated that Vladimir Putin, as head of state, “enjoys absolute immunity from the jurisdiction of foreign states”.
