NEW YORK, APRIL 27 – Addressing an Arria-formula meeting of the Security Council on accountability in Ukraine, the Italian Permanent Representative of Italy to the United Nations in New York, Ambassador Maurizio Massari, proclaimed that “perpetrators of crimes must be brought to justice”.
The meeting in the ECOSOC chamber on “Ensuring accountability for atrocities committed in Ukraine” was convened by the delegations of France and Albania. Massari recalled that Italy joined over 40 States asking the referral of Russia’s actions in Ukraine to the International Criminal Court: “We support Ukraine’s legal action against the Russian Federation at the International Court of Justice and the work of the OSCE’s Moscow Mechanism”, a fact-finding team established on 14 March by the OSCE to investigate abuses of international human rights law and international humanitarian law in Ukraine. Russia is not part of the ICC neither is Ukraine, but Kyiv has accepted the Court jurisdiction over crimes committed within its territory.
The Italian Ambassador also referred to the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on Ukraine, authorized by the Human Rights Council, and composed by three human rights experts for an initial duration of one year, complementing, consolidating and building upon the work of the human rights monitoring mission in Ukraine, in close coordination the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights.
The Commission has the mandate to investigate all alleged violations and abuses of human rights and violations of international humanitarian law in the context of the aggression against Ukraine by the Russian Federation; to collect, consolidate and analyse evidence of such violations and abuses, including their gender dimension; and to identify, where possible, those individuals and entities responsible for violations or abuses, with a view to ensuring that those responsible are held accountable. (@OnuItalia)
