MOSCOW, Dec 14 Latvian President Egils Levits said that An international tribunal for Ukraine could be held in Riga after the idea did not receive universal approval in the European Union.
The head of EU diplomacy, Josep Borrell, said earlier on Wednesday that the proposal of the European Commission to create some kind of specialized international tribunal for Ukraine did not find a unified support of EU foreign ministers at a recent meeting in Brussels.
The European Commission at the end of November came up with the initiative to create a special international tribunal for Ukraine under the auspices of the UN. EC chief Ursula von der Leyen said the commission is «ready to work with international partners» to advance the initiative. Later, the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague, Karim Khan, noted that the EU plans to create a special tribunal «undermine a similar investigation that the ICC is conducting.» The document «on the fight against impunity for crimes committed» in Ukraine, agreed on December 9 by the EU Council, does not even mention the proposal of the EC on the tribunal.
“In international relations, ideas mature for a long time, but in this case the idea matures quite quickly, only ten months have passed … Last week, the European Commission published a message that supports the creation of such a tribunal, I hope that it will be created. The question is where «Maybe if it will be with partial participation of Ukraine, a hybrid version, then it will definitely be Kyiv. Or if outside of Ukraine, it could be Riga. There was the Nuremberg Tribunal, maybe the Riga Tribunal,» Levits said in an interview with the LSM portal .
The President of Latvia argues that such a tribunal does not require the decision of the UN Security Council, where Russia has the right of veto. «Other organizations can do this, for example, the Council of Europe or simply on the basis of an agreement between countries — countries with the same opinion create such a tribunal. There may be a hybrid model, it may be partly due to Ukrainian legislation,» Levits said. Earlier in an interview with Bloomberg, Levits said that a special tribunal would make it possible to seize Russia's assets abroad and transfer them to Ukraine for restoration.
Russia is not a member of the ICC. Russia's Permanent Representative to the UN Geneva Headquarters Gennady Gatilov said that the creation of a mechanism under the auspices of the UN requires the approval of the UN Security Council, without which the proposed EU «tribunal on Ukraine» is impossible. Press Secretary of the President of the Russian Federation Dmitry Peskov pointed out that Russia categorically rejects Kyiv's accusations of war crimes on the territory of Ukraine. The Russian Foreign Ministry called the idea of creating an international court for Ukraine a «cabal» and stated that it would not have jurisdiction over Russia.
On March 2, the Prosecutor's Office of the International Criminal Court launched an investigation into war crimes and crimes against humanity in Ukraine. ICC Prosecutor Karim Khan said on March 11 that the court's investigative team had begun collecting evidence as part of this investigation.
The Russian Foreign Ministry said earlier that «neither the bloody anti-constitutional coup in Kyiv, nor the crimes against the inhabitants of Donbass have not yet become a reason to intensify the investigation.» The DPR also reported that Donbass public activists sent to the ICC case files on thousands of war crimes of Ukrainian security forces in the region. According to the LPR Ministry of Foreign Affairs, during the eight years of the conflict in the Donbass, the LPR and the DPR filed more than 3,000 lawsuits about Kyiv's war crimes with the ECHR and the International Criminal Court. However, the court did not start investigating these cases. The Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation reported that representatives of Russian legal entities prepared and sent to the ECHR more than 7,350 complaints from residents of Donbass who suffered from the actions of the Ukrainian authorities. The fact that there are more than 7 thousand such statements was also reported in the Ministry of Justice of Ukraine.